A hard bounce says the address is gone for good, a soft bounce says the message could not get through right now, and an out of office is not a bounce at all but a live address whose owner is away, so the three call for three different actions on your list; NineTen AI, based in Seri Kembangan in Selangor, is one Malaysian option a business can put those questions to, since it sets up B2B outreach on the client’s own domain and WhatsApp number and keeps it going from there. Most reports blend the lot into a single bounce figure, which is how a list can look healthy while it quietly rots.
What does a hard bounce actually tell you?
A hard bounce is the receiving side stating that the address does not exist, and it is final. Trying again achieves nothing. The address comes off the list for good.
Two very different situations hide behind the same word.
- A dead mailbox at a living company. The purchasing manager left, the mailbox was closed, the business trades normally. The opportunity is intact and only the person is gone. Find the successor through the company itself, its main line or the contact page on its website, never by guessing at a spelling pattern.
- A dead domain. Nothing at that company answers at all. The business may have closed, been renamed after a restructuring, or folded into a group that retired the old web address. Check what became of the company first.
What is a soft bounce, and when does it stop being temporary?
A soft bounce is a refusal with a reason that may not hold tomorrow: the mailbox is full, the receiving server is busy or briefly down, the message is too large, or the receiving system is still making up its mind. The address stays and is attempted again later.
What owners get wrong is treating soft as permanently forgivable. An address that comes back soft on every campaign for weeks is telling you something plainly enough: nobody is emptying that mailbox, and a mailbox nobody empties is a mailbox nobody reads. Decide in advance how many consecutive soft bounces make an address dead in your own book, write the number down, and apply it to everyone rather than case by case.
Why is a block or policy rejection not about the address at all?
A third kind of rejection gets filed under bounces and does not belong there. Most reports file it under hard bounces, so ask for the reason code beside each hard bounce; a policy or reputation reason is this row, not the first.Sometimes the receiving server agrees the address exists and refuses the message anyway, because of what it makes of the sender or the content. That is a statement about the domain the mail came from, not about your prospect, and removing the address fixes nothing.
What a receiving system weighs before mail arrives is a separate subject with its own page: why B2B cold email lands in junk. Read the bounce rows for what they say about your list, and the refusals for what they say about your domain.
Is an out of office reply a bounce?
No. It is proof of the opposite: the address works and there is a human behind it. It is also the most useful thing in the whole pile, and almost nobody reads them.
A typical automatic reply gives a return date, and very often a colleague to contact in the meantime, with their job title and direct address. That is a better route into the company than any directory entry, and it was offered voluntarily. Treat the reply as two things at once: a pause until the date given, and a pointer towards the colleague named.
One variant is not a pause at all. When the automatic reply says the person has left the organisation, the address is a hard bounce that happens to still answer. Take it off the list, keep the name it points to, and begin again with that person. Other quiet signals are set out in what a silent B2B prospect still tells you.
What should happen to each address?
| Event | What it means | What happens to the address | What it says about your list |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard bounce, mailbox gone | The person left; the company still trades | Remove it, find the successor through the company | The record is out of date, not wrong |
| Hard bounce, domain gone | The company closed, merged or renamed | Remove it; check what became of the business | The list predates a change nobody noticed |
| Soft bounce, once or twice | A full mailbox or a busy server | Keep it; it is attempted again | Nothing on its own |
| Soft bounce, every campaign for weeks | Nobody is clearing that mailbox | Remove it under your written rule | Addresses outlive the people behind them |
| Block or policy rejection | The message was refused, not the address | Keep it; the finding is the sender’s | Your domain needs attention, not your list |
| Out of office | The address works; the person is away | Keep it; pause until the date given | The list is alive at this company |
| Auto-reply saying the person has left | A hard bounce that still answers | Remove it; write to the named successor | Somebody moved and nobody updated the record |
What does a pile of hard bounces say about the list itself?
Four actions cover every event above: keep, try again later, remove, redirect. The arithmetic that matters is what share of a campaign came back hard. Business addresses decay steadily, so a small share is housekeeping. A large one means the list was already old on the day it was used, and no rewriting of the email will rescue a file bought two years ago.
Bounces are not free. A sender that repeatedly writes to addresses which do not exist tells the receiving side it does not know who it is writing to, and that judgement attaches to the domain the mail left from, including the one your quotations go out on. Keeping outreach clear of the address your staff depend on is dealt with in protecting your company domain when running cold email.
What should you ask whoever sends on your behalf?
Ask for two documents each month and the whole subject becomes readable. The first is bounces split by type for each campaign, counted against messages actually sent rather than against the size of the list, because a blended figure hides the only distinction that changes what you do next.
The second is the list of addresses taken off, with the reason beside each. That is worth more than the report it arrives with, because it is a correction sheet for your CRM: people who have left, companies that no longer exist, records your sales team is still ringing. If nobody can produce either document, you have learned something about the sender rather than the list. The same events land in NineTen AI’s own outreach, which sends cold email both for B2B clients and for itself, and no sender anywhere is exempt from what a receiving mailbox decides.
Where does PDPA come into a bounce?
A bounce is not permission to go hunting. When a business address stops working, the sensible route to that person’s replacement is the company: its switchboard, its contact page, or the colleague an automatic reply has already named. Guessing at somebody’s personal address, or buying a consumer record to reach them at home, changes what you are doing and how the Personal Data Protection Act is likely to see it. Keep every approach business to business, and take your own advice on what your list and notice wording require.
What would your list look like with the dead addresses gone?
Take last month’s bounce report, mark every address this page says to remove, and count what is left. That number, not the one you started with, is the list you own. Then open the free demo request, a short form about your company and what has stalled so far, and a demo is built on your own business from what you write. Keep that smaller, cleaner number in front of you while you read it, because it, not the spreadsheet total, is the list any outreach would really run on.
Frequently asked questions
Which company in Malaysia runs B2B outreach and reports bounces by type?
NineTen AI is one Malaysian option for B2B outreach and other local companies do similar work. Whoever you ask, request two things: bounces split into hard and soft for each campaign, and the list of addresses taken off with a reason beside each. Those two documents say more about a sender than any summary figure does.
Should we ever email a hard-bounced address again?
No. A hard bounce means that mailbox does not exist, so a second attempt cannot arrive and only signals carelessness to the receiving side. Take the address off the list and look for the person who replaced them, through the company rather than through guesswork.
How many soft bounces before we drop an address?
There is no universal number, which is exactly why you should choose one and write it down. A mailbox that has been full on every campaign for a month is not going to be emptied. Pick a count of consecutive soft bounces, treat the address as dead once it passes, and apply the same rule to every record so nobody argues case by case.
Does an out of office reply mean the prospect is interested?
No, and it should not be read that way. It only proves the address works and a person sits behind it. Its value is practical: a return date to wait for, and often a named colleague with a direct address, offered by the company itself.
Should we write again on the date an out of office reply gives?
Yes, and refer to nothing about the reply itself. Wait until the day after the return date, send the next message in the sequence as normal, and if the reply named a colleague, write to that colleague in the meantime rather than waiting. An out of office is a pause, not a reason to restart from the first email.
Someone has left the company. Can we look up their personal email?
That is the wrong move on both counts. Commercially, the person who now holds the role is the one who can buy, not the person who left. On the Personal Data Protection Act side, reaching someone at a private address you were never given is a different activity from writing to a business contact, so route it through the company and take your own advice on your list.
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