How can I test bounce alerts and what are some example bounce email addresses?
Summary
What email marketers say8Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Mailjet Blog explains that to simulate bounces, you can use specific email addresses designed to trigger hard bounces (non-existent addresses) or soft bounces (full mailbox) to test your system's response.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains the best way to test bounce alerts is to send an email to a non-existent address on your own domain.
Email marketer from Litmus explains that it is essential to regularly monitor bounce rates and implement feedback loops to automatically remove invalid email addresses from your list to maintain a healthy sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email on Acid explains establishing a threshold for bounce rates, and triggering alerts when the bounce rate exceeds acceptable levels.
Email marketer from Stack Overflow community explains creating a test email server with invalid recipient addresses to force bounce messages and analyzing the returned error codes for different bounce types.
Email marketer from Quora user suggests using addresses like 'nonexistent@yourdomain.com' to generate hard bounces.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum suggests sending test emails to disposable email addresses or addresses known to cause bounces.
Email marketer from Reddit recommends using a dedicated bounce processing service or library within your application to automatically parse and interpret bounce notifications from the mail server.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that a Gmail no such user response looks like: 550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces.
Expert from Email Geeks shares the following addresses for testing bounces: reject@wordtothewise.com which will reject any mail sent to it and defer@wordtothewise.com which will defer any email sent to it.
Expert from Word to the Wise provides reject@wordtothewise.com, which rejects all mail, and defer@wordtothewise.com, which defers all mail, as test addresses for simulating bounce and deferral events.
Expert from Spamresource explains that blocklisting can impact bounces by causing mail servers to reject email, resulting in a bounce message being sent to the sender.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from SendGrid explains that understanding and parsing bounce codes is key to determining the reason an email bounced and taking corrective action.
Documentation from RFC Editor explains that SMTP uses numeric error codes (e.g., 5xx for permanent failures, 4xx for temporary failures) to indicate the reason for a bounce, allowing systems to categorize and handle bounce events accordingly.
Documentation from IETF details the format of bounce messages (Delivery Status Notifications or DSN) as specified in RFC 3464, which provides a standard way to report delivery failures.
Documentation from Microsoft explains that Exchange uses Non-Delivery Report (NDR) codes to specify the reason for bounced emails, and these codes can be used to identify the cause of the bounce.
Documentation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) explains that you should configure your system to listen for bounce notifications sent by SES when an email cannot be delivered.