Should I retry sending emails after receiving a "Connection Error" bounce reason?
Summary
What email marketers say7Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Reddit recommends against retrying emails that resulted in a connection error. Suggesting it's more efficient to clean your list to preserve your sender reputation rather than attempting to resend. The poster mentions that they have experience with bulk email and keeping sender reputation intact.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that the reported "Connection Error" is actually a block. The fact that the emails are being actively blocked indicates that the domain health is already poor.
Email marketer from Mailchimp explains that repeatedly sending to bad email addresses or those that result in bounces of any kind, including connection errors, damages your sender reputation. Maintaining a clean list is recommended to ensure deliverability.
Email marketer from Hubspot explains the different types of bounces and recommends avoiding sending future emails to email addresses that cause hard bounces (permanent reasons). Connection errors are often classified as hard bounces.
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor stresses the importance of a clean email list and suggests against retrying emails that have hard bounced. It is important to reduce bounce rate overall to preserve a good sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum suggests segmenting connection errors. They elaborate that segmenting them from other hard bounces is important because sometimes the connection error is temporary and therefore the email could still be delivered later.
Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that a connection error usually constitutes a hard bounce. Repeatedly sending to an address that has hard bounced can negatively affect your sender reputation.
What the experts say2Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise explains the importance of analyzing bounce messages to understand the reason for the failure. A connection error can be temporary, so monitoring these responses separately from permanent failures is recommended to determine if a retry is appropriate. However, repeated connection errors from the same domain often indicates a more serious problem and retrying is not likely to succeed.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that retrying the email is pointless because it appears to be an Office 365 tenant block. To resolve this, the domain owner (not O365) needs to be contacted to unblock the domain, and each tenant would need to be contacted individually.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from Mailjet explains that a "Connection Error" (or timeout error) often indicates a temporary problem on the recipient's server. Retrying after a delay might be successful, but persistent errors suggest a more significant issue like the recipient server being down or blocking the sender.
Documentation from SparkPost explains the difference between transient and permanent bounces. They elaborate that a transient bounce suggests a retry could be attempted, while a permanent bounce means it should not be retried.
Documentation from RFC Editor explains that 4xx SMTP reply codes signify transient failures, suggesting retrying later might succeed. However, 5xx codes, indicating permanent failures, warrant removal from the mailing list.
Documentation from Amazon SES explains that bounces are categorized as hard or soft. A connection error would likely fall under a hard bounce, for permanent failures, and therefore should not be retried repeatedly.
Related resources2Resources
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