What is Bounce Risk, and how do I lower it?

Sometimes an email isn’t delivered late — it isn’t delivered at all. A mailbox provider like Yahoo or Gmail can look at what’s inside a message and refuse it outright, for what they call policy reasons. Nothing is wrong with your list, and the refusal doesn’t tell you which part of the email caused it.

Bounce Risk reads your draft the way those providers read it, while you can still change it. You’ll find it in the right-hand panel when you click Preview and schedule, just below Email Weight.

Reading the score

Bounce Risk shows one of three readings:

• Low — nothing in this draft looks like the content providers refuse. Most of your editions will sit here.
• Elevated — a few things worth a look before you send.
• High — several things in this draft match what providers refuse. Worth fixing.

Click the arrow next to the reading to open it up. If anything was found, What’s driving this lists it — every finding names the exact wording or web address that caused it, so you can go straight to it rather than guessing. Hover the information icon beside any finding for what to do about it.

Underneath, What we checked names the four things Bounce Risk looks at and what it found in each. That list is there even when your reading is Low and nothing was found, so you can tell the difference between a clean edition and a check that had nothing to say about the part you were worried about. It’s also the honest boundary of the feature: if something isn’t on that list, Bounce Risk isn’t judging it.

What Bounce Risk looks for

Web addresses you don’t control

The biggest single cause, and the least obvious. Providers judge every web address in your email, not just who it came from — and an ad network’s click and image addresses are shared with every other publisher using that network. Their reputation becomes yours, and it can change without you touching your newsletter. This is usually what’s behind an email that started being refused when nothing about it changed.

What to do: ask your ad platform for click and image addresses on your own domain — most offer this. Otherwise host the image yourself and link straight to the advertiser.

Shortened links get flagged for a related reason: a provider can’t see where they go, so it assumes the worst. Link to the full address instead.

Prize and giveaway wording

Phrases like “win a free trip” or “enter to win” are among the most heavily weighted things a provider looks for, because it’s what most junk mail looks like. This catches legitimate coverage too — a festival giving away a flight reads exactly like a scam offering one.

What to do: describe what the event is rather than what a reader might win, and keep the contest details behind the article link.

Words from restricted categories

Providers keep lists of topics they treat carefully — tobacco and vaping, drugs, alcohol, gambling, firearms, health and pharmacy claims, and finance. They match these by topic, not by intent. A story about your village banning nitrous oxide sales in vape shops scores the same as an advertisement selling them. That isn’t fair, but it’s how the filters work, and it’s worth knowing when a story like that is in your edition.

What to do: you don’t have to drop the story. Keep those words out of your subject line and preview text, which are read first and weighed hardest, and let your headline point to the article rather than repeating the term.

On their own, these words won’t raise your Bounce Risk — a church raffle or a prescription drop-off day is ordinary local news, and the reading stays Low. They only start to count when something else on this list is present too.

Layout that’s hard to read

Two patterns get flagged:

• Image-only blocks with no text. A provider that can’t read a section has to guess, and several of them in one email looks like text hidden inside pictures. Give each one a caption or a text link beneath it, and make sure the image’s alt text says what the image says.
• Many links for the amount of writing. A dense grid of links over short teasers is the shape of a link farm. Either lengthen the teasers or run fewer stories in this edition.

Plain http:// links are also flagged — switch them to https://.

What Bounce Risk is not

It’s a read of your content, not a prediction. Mailbox providers don’t publish their rules, and they change them. A High reading doesn’t mean your email will be refused, and a Low one is not a guarantee it won’t be.

It also only looks at what’s in this edition. How your sending reputation is doing overall, and what happened to editions you’ve already sent, are different questions — see What can I do to improve my email deliverability? and Why Did My Email Go to Spam?.

The reading refreshes when you save, so if you make a change it reflects the version you’re about to send.