Soft bounces and the three-strike rule

A soft bounce means "not now" rather than "never": a full mailbox, a busy server, greylisting. One or two of those are not worth losing a real prospect over, so nothing is suppressed on the first or second.

Three CONSECUTIVE soft bounces on the same address, with no successful delivery in between, suppress it. Consecutive is what makes this safe: a successful delivery resets the count to zero, so an address whose mailbox fills up three times across a year, with good sends in between, is never suppressed. Only three in a row escalates.

The third strike does what a hard bounce does: the address goes on your Suppression List with the reason "repeatedly undeliverable", the contact's email is marked Invalid, their active sequences stop, and anything already queued to them is cancelled. It is recorded under its own reason so you can tell it apart from an address that never existed. You will see it on the campaign's Stopped card as "Repeatedly undeliverable", and on the Suppression List.

Below three strikes nothing is suppressed and the contact is still yours to judge: Contacts, then Filters, then Bounced, then "Needs a decision" lists everything that bounced without being suppressed. A bounce we cannot classify never counts as a strike.

The count is yours alone. A mail server refusing your messages three times says something about your sending to that server, not about the address itself, so nothing is written anywhere another HuntSales customer could read. Both sending paths feed the count: platform sends, and the bounce-backs read from a connected Gmail, Microsoft or SMTP inbox.