// Glossary
Soft Bounce
A temporary delivery failure, such as a full mailbox or a server that's down, that may succeed on retry.
Definition
A soft bounce is a temporary email delivery failure where the address is valid but the message couldn't be delivered right now, often because the mailbox is full, the message is too large, or the receiving server is temporarily unavailable. Mail systems usually retry soft bounces for a period before giving up. Persistent soft bounces can eventually be treated like hard bounces and should be monitored.