What causes high Barracuda bounce rates after migrating to HubSpot and how to resolve them?
Summary
What email marketers say12Marketer opinions
Email marketer from SendGrid shares that sender reputation is a crucial factor in email deliverability. They share that sender reputation is influenced by factors like bounce rates, spam complaints, and engagement metrics. Monitoring and maintaining a positive sender reputation is essential for ensuring that emails reach the inbox.
Email marketer from Litmus shares that understanding bounce rate benchmarks can help identify deliverability issues. A high bounce rate, especially after migrating to a new ESP, can indicate problems with your email list or sending practices. They recommend comparing your bounce rates to industry averages and investigating any significant deviations.
Email marketer from Email on Acid shares that email content can significantly impact deliverability. They suggest avoiding spam trigger words, using proper HTML coding, ensuring a good text-to-image ratio, and providing a clear unsubscribe link. Emails that appear spammy are more likely to be blocked by filters like Barracuda.
Email marketer from Email Hippo explains that Barracuda Networks is a security company that provides email security solutions, including anti-spam and anti-phishing. High bounce rates with Barracuda could be due to spam filtering. They suggest checking your sender reputation, authenticating your emails (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and ensuring your email content is not flagged as spam.
Email marketer from Validity explains that DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) builds on SPF and DKIM by allowing domain owners to specify how email receivers should handle messages that fail authentication checks. A DMARC policy can instruct receivers to reject, quarantine, or deliver messages that fail authentication, and it provides reporting mechanisms to monitor email authentication results.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum explains on a forum that slowly increasing the volume of emails sent from a new IP address or ESP is crucial for establishing a positive sending reputation. An IP warmup helps build trust with ISPs and avoid being flagged as spam.
Email marketer from StackExchange shares that for email authentication you should publish an SPF record for your domain to define which IP addresses are authorized to send email from your domain. You should also configure DKIM signing to prove your messages are not forged.
Email marketer from Mailjet shares that improving email deliverability involves several steps, including warming up your IP address, segmenting your email lists, and cleaning up your email lists regularly to remove inactive or invalid email addresses. They suggest to carefully monitor your sending reputation and adjust your strategy as needed.
Email marketer from Reddit User suggests on Reddit that Barracuda can block emails if the sending IP address has a poor reputation. This can happen if you're on a shared IP and another user is sending spam. The user recommends checking your IP's reputation on various blacklists and potentially requesting removal. They also suggest using a dedicated IP address.
Marketer from Email Geeks says it sounds like shared domain blocking and to see if HS has any shared domains blocked by Barracuda.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests that Barracuda might be blocking the entire AWS IP ranges, as Hubspot uses Amazon SES.
Email marketer from Constant Contact shares the importance of cleaning your email list. You should regularly remove bounced addresses and opt-outs. List cleaning helps maintain a high sender reputation and improve deliverability.
What the experts say6Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that if the recipients are behind Barracuda, recent opens and clicks could be from Barracuda checks on incoming mail. Barracuda might have identified a different sending source and are heavily filtering mail. To address the original question, there's no direct contact with Barracuda, but warming up the Barracuda domains slower is recommended.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that good list hygiene is about more than just removing old addresses, it is about focusing on the health and engagement of your subscribers to increase engagement rates, leading to improved deliverability and inbox placement.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that it is very important to monitor your email bounce rate, especially when moving to a new platform, to identify technical or list issues and take swift corrective action if needed.
Expert from Email Geeks states that Baracuda is the new problem and probably not the source of opens and clicks on the old system.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that migrating to a new email platform (like Hubspot) has two core ingredients, infrastructure setup and reputation, and you must get them both right to ensure deliverability to the inbox
Expert from Email Geeks explains that a blocked bounce means the sender went above the score threshold and that the barracuda console has more details as to what rule or rules it was.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from HubSpot explains that bounces are categorized as either hard or soft. A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered, such as a non-existent email address. Soft bounces are temporary issues. High bounce rates, especially hard bounces, negatively impact sender reputation. The documentation also details specific bounce codes and their meanings, which can help diagnose Barracuda-related bounce issues.
Documentation from SparkPost explains that implementing sender authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is crucial for improving email deliverability and avoiding spam filters. These protocols help verify that the sender is authorized to send emails on behalf of the domain. Incorrectly configured or missing authentication records can lead to higher bounce rates.
Documentation from DKIM explains that DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) provides a method for validating that a message truly came from the domain it claims to be from. DKIM uses cryptographic signatures to verify the message's authenticity.
Documentation from RFC explains that Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specifies the technical method to prevent sender address forgery. An SPF record lists all the authorized IP addresses or networks that are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain.
Documentation from Barracuda explains that Barracuda uses Reputation Block Lists (RBLs) to filter spam. If your sending IP is listed on an RBL, your emails are likely to be blocked or bounced. They explain to check if your IP is on any common RBLs and work to get it removed. The documentation mentions reasons for being listed, such as spam complaints or compromised accounts.