There are a number of things that can happen once you've sent your campaign. Below is a diagram of what might happen and what we do in each case.

1. Once you've finished creating your email and you press send we generate a personalized email for each contact you are mailing.
   
   
2. These are then added to your mailing queue. Once everything is ready to go we use SMTP to send the email from our server.
   
   
3. Your email travels in fractions of seconds to the recipients' server. At this point, there are a number of things that might happen:
   1. Their server accepts the email and is either:
      • delivered to the recipient - happy days; 
      • your email ends up in the spam folder - uh oh; 
      • or your email is deleted before it gets to the recipient - double uh oh.
        
        
   2. Their server rejects your email because it is invalid. When this happens we receive a bounce message from the server. There are over 100 different types of bounce messages that exist you can read more about it here. When we receive a bounce message of this kind we will classify this as a Hard Bounce. You can then see any emails that hard bounce in your reporting. After 2 consecutive bounces, we suppress the email.
      
      
   3. Their server temporarily rejects the send to that individual. This type of bounce doesn't mean that the email address is invalid but there are quite a few reasons why it might temporarily bounce. For example, the recipient's server could be experiencing problems, or the recipient has a full mailbox. If you want to find out more about this click here. We will attempt to redeliver the email for up to 48 hours. We will categorize this email as a soft bounce and after 5 consecutive bounces, we will suppress the email address. 

Next: What are bounces?