What is a good email bounce rate, and how do you get there?

Your bounce rate is the share of sent emails that never reach an inbox because the address is invalid, full, or blocked. It is the single clearest signal a mailbox provider uses to decide whether you are a legitimate sender or a spammer.

What counts as a good bounce rate

Industry guidance puts a healthy cold-email bounce rate under 2%. Past roughly 3%, providers like Google and Microsoft begin throttling delivery for your whole domain — not just the bad addresses. Above 5% you are in territory that can get a sending domain blacklisted.

• Under 2% — healthy. Keep sending.
• 2–3% — warning. Pause and re-verify the list.
• Over 5% — danger. Your domain reputation is actively degrading.

Why purchased lists bounce

Most B2B databases sell pattern-guessed emails: they assume firstname.lastname@company.com and ship it without ever confirming the mailbox exists. Independent tests of large providers report bounce rates of 15–25% on those guessed rows. The list looks full; a quarter of it is fiction.

A "verified" label means nothing if the vendor cannot show you where the email was found.

How provenance keeps the rate low

Veritrace only delivers an email it found on a fetched public page, and every row links to that source. If we cannot confirm an address, the row is flagged needs-enrichment instead of guessed. You send to addresses that demonstrably existed at a real URL — which is why the rows you send to bounce far less than a guessed list.