What Is Non-Delivery Report (NDR)?

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When you email someone, it's like sending a message in a bottle. You send your message out into the world, and it floats around until it finds its destination. If that destination is full of messages, or if the recipient has moved on to another email account, your message may not reach its destination. That's where Non-Delivery Reports come in. A Non-Delivery Report (NDR) is an automatic report generated by the sender's mail server to inform them that their email message wasn't successfully delivered. When you receive an NDR, the delivery failure is explained in an email message from their mail server. This usually occurs because the destination email address is placed in the 'To' field or because their inbox is complete and they cannot receive new messages. Non-delivery reports, or non-delivery receipts (NDRs), indicate that a message has been sent to a recipient but that the recipient's email server has rejected it. They're also known as bounce messages, bounced messages, non-delivery notifications (NDNs) or delivery status notifications (DSNs). The SMTP 500 error is a non-delivery report generated by the sender's mail server based on a standard SMTP 500 error coding system. Specifically, it is caused by the sender's mail server based on an SMTP 500 error code given by the receiver's mail server. Errors that bar messages from being delivered can occur at many stages during mail delivery, such as when a sender's mail server cannot find the receiver's mail server for any reason or when the receiver has configured their email server to forward emails to another mail server which has failed for some reason. These are good delivery failure scenarios and have their own SMTP 500 code that informs senders why their emails bounced, and if you're an email marketer or sender, you should know them all!

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