Can 'invalid recipient' bounce messages be false positives and what should I do about it?

Email marketer from Litmus Blog discusses that high bounce rates can negatively impact sender reputation and deliverability. They suggest monitoring bounce codes and investigating potential causes for false positives, such as temporary server issues or misconfigured systems.

Email marketer from SendGrid Blog advises that some bounces can be soft bounces which are temporary issues. They recommend retrying delivery for soft bounces but immediately removing hard bounces (invalid recipient) from your list. However, monitoring bounce codes for anomalies can help detect false positives.

Email marketer from MailerLite suggests segmenting email lists to target specific groups, reducing the chance of emails being sent to inactive accounts that could cause a bounce and be a false positive

Email marketer from GMass recommends using double opt-in to reduce the likelihood of invalid emails. This process ensures that email addresses are valid and reduces the chances of false positives and bounces.

Email marketer from Mailjet Blog shares that hard bounces, including invalid recipient errors, can sometimes be false positives if the recipient server experiences temporary issues or if there are typos in the email address.

Email marketer from HubSpot Blog explains that hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures (e.g., invalid recipient) and should be removed immediately. However, they suggest monitoring bounce codes closely, as misconfigured servers or temporary issues could lead to false positives.

Email marketer from Email on Acid recommends maintaining good list hygiene practices, including regularly cleaning your email list to remove invalid addresses. However, they advise caution, as temporary server issues or typos could result in valid addresses being incorrectly flagged as invalid.

Email marketer from Reddit suggests that if you suspect false positives, implement an email verification service to confirm the validity of email addresses before sending, which can help reduce bounces and improve deliverability.

Email marketer from StackOverflow explains that 'no such user here' errors can sometimes be caused by temporary server problems, greylisting, or anti-spam measures and suggests that retrying the message later might succeed.

Expert from Word to the Wise mentions that address harvesting will result in bounces, complaints, and invalid addresses. Having a good data feed and being able to unsubscribe quickly is important.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that invalid recipient errors can be false positives due to temporary database issues, ActiveDirectory/LDAP problems, or network issues.

Expert from Email Geeks says treat user unknowns like spamtraps and a high enough percentage indicates an address collection problem.

Experts from Email Geeks suggest that immediately suppressing an address after a single rejection is aggressive and that identity provider failure modes can affect a subset of users. Laura notes these failures aren't typically seen with Gmail/Yahoo addresses. Steve advises to check the bounce classifier if issues appear with those providers.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains that temporary rejections can happen due to greylisting or other rate-limiting strategies, but these are usually indicated by specific temporary failure codes (4xx).

Documentation from Google Workspace Admin Help explains that bounce messages can occur due to various issues, including incorrect email addresses, server problems, or blocked email. While focusing on identifying valid errors, it implicitly acknowledges the possibility of transient issues causing temporary rejections.

Documentation from Microsoft Docs explains that non-delivery reports (NDRs) indicating an invalid recipient can occur due to temporary server issues, DNS problems, or recipient mailbox issues.

Documentation from RFC Editor defines SMTP error codes such as 550, which indicates that the recipient mailbox is unavailable or the email address is invalid, but suggests that temporary errors (4xx codes) could indicate transient issues causing false positives.

Documentation from AWS Documentation explains that Amazon SES provides feedback on bounces and complaints, distinguishing between hard and soft bounces. It notes that hard bounces (invalid recipient) should be removed from the sending list, but suggests monitoring bounce reasons for potential configuration issues that may cause false positives.