# What might cause an email to “soft bounce?”

> Source: https://support.associationsphere.com/what-might-cause-an-email-to-soft-bounce  |  Updated: 2026-07-07T20:33:52Z

Even if you do everything right, sometimes an email will not go through to its intended recipient. This is called a “soft bounce.” In many cases, the email client (e.g., Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc.) will try to redeliver the message several times over a period of hours or days and will only consider it undeliverable after the retry process times out.

The reasons for a soft bounce include:

- The mailbox is full or has recently received an unusually high volume of email
- The message sent is too large and has exceeded the limits of the receiving server
- There was a temporary DNS issue with the receiving server.

AssociationSphere will automatically unsubscribe soft bounces if the message has not been successfully delivered after retrying for 48 hours.