Email bounces have a negative impact. This article discusses reasons for bounces and recommends steps you can take to make email communication more successful.

There are various reasons why emails are not delivered and figuring out why can be somewhat of a mystery. The good news is that with a little investigation, you should be able to improve your email bounce rate.

The most common reasons email are marked undelivered are:

• The recipient's email address contains a typo or doesn't exist.

• The person may have closed the account, left the organization, or provided a false address.

• The recipient's email isn't deliverable because the receiving email server is temporarily unavailable or overloaded. If the email continues to bounce, it may mean the server is gone forever.

• Inbox is full or the size of the email or attachment is too large to fit in the inbox The recipient has his/her email set to "Vacation/Auto-Reply".

• The email was delivered to their inbox, but you will still receive an "undelivered" notification. If this continues for months on end, you may want to remove the contact.

• A receiving server may block the recipient's email and place it in a "blocked" category. You're more likely to see this when communicating with corporate, educational, or government institutions.

• The recipient will need to ask their employer to unblock the email or provide you with an alternative.

  Tip: Encourage members to update their profiles annually. This helps minimize bounced emails.