HubSpot Bounced Emails: How to Find and Fix Them

HubSpot bounced emails are messages that failed to deliver to a contact’s inbox. HubSpot automatically flags these contacts and, in the case of hard bounces, blocks future sends to protect your sender reputation. You can find bounced contacts by navigating to Marketing > Email > Health or by creating a contact list filtered by bounce status.

If you’re seeing a growing number of bounces in your HubSpot email reports, you’re not alone. Email lists naturally decay over time as people change jobs, abandon inboxes, and switch providers. The good news is that HubSpot gives you the tools to identify bounced contacts, and with a little effort, you can clean things up and get your deliverability back on track.

How to Find Bounced Emails in HubSpot

HubSpot makes it fairly straightforward to track down bounced contacts, but the exact path depends on what you’re looking for. Here are the main ways to find them.

Check Individual Email Performance

After you send a marketing email, you can see bounce data right in the email’s performance report.

1. Go to Marketing > Email in your HubSpot navigation.
2. Click on the specific email you want to review.
3. Select the Recipients tab.
4. Use the filter dropdown to select Bounced.

This shows you every contact who bounced on that particular send. HubSpot will also tell you whether it was a hard bounce or a soft bounce, which matters a lot for what you do next.

Use the Email Health Tab

For a broader view of your bounce trends, HubSpot’s email health dashboard is your best friend.

1. Navigate to Marketing > Email.
2. Click the Health tab at the top.
3. Review your overall bounce rate and trends over time.

This dashboard gives you a high-level picture of how your email program is performing. If your bounce rate is climbing, it’s a clear signal that your list needs attention.

Create a Bounced Contacts List

The most actionable approach is to build a smart list of all your bounced contacts.

1. Go to Contacts > Lists.
2. Click Create list and choose Contact-based and Active list.
3. Set your filter to Email bounce reason is known (or filter by Hard bounced under email subscription status).
4. Save and name your list something clear, like “All Bounced Contacts.”

This list will automatically update as new bounces come in, giving you a living view of your bounce problem.

Understanding Bounce Types in HubSpot

HubSpot categorizes bounces into three buckets, and each one requires a different response. If you want a deeper dive into bounce types in general, check out our bounced email definition guide.

Hard Bounces

A hard bounce means the email address is permanently undeliverable. The address doesn’t exist, the domain is dead, or the server has permanently rejected your message. HubSpot takes hard bounces seriously. Once a contact hard bounces, HubSpot automatically blocks all future marketing email sends to that address. You’ll see a banner on the contact record that says the contact has been hard bounced.

Common causes include:

• Typos in the email address (e.g., john@gmial.com instead of gmail.com)
• The person left their company and their work email was deactivated
• Fake or disposable addresses used during signup
• The domain no longer exists

Soft Bounces

A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure. The email address is valid, but something prevented delivery right now. HubSpot will retry sending to soft-bounced contacts, but if an address soft bounces repeatedly, HubSpot may eventually treat it like a hard bounce.

Typical causes include:

• The recipient’s mailbox is full
• The receiving server is temporarily down
• Your email message is too large
• A temporary spam filter block

Pending Bounces

HubSpot also shows a “pending” status for emails that are still being processed or retried. These are essentially in limbo. Most pending emails will either deliver successfully or eventually register as a soft bounce. You don’t need to take action on pending emails, but keep an eye on them if a large percentage of your sends are stuck in this state.

What HubSpot Does with Bounced Contacts

HubSpot has built-in protections to keep your sender reputation safe, but it’s important to understand exactly what happens behind the scenes.

When a contact hard bounces, HubSpot does the following:

• Blocks all future marketing emails to that contact automatically
• Marks the contact record with a hard bounce banner
• Logs the bounce reason so you can see why it failed
• Does NOT delete the contact from your database

This last point is critical. HubSpot keeps bounced contacts in your CRM, which means they’re still counting toward your contact tier and billing. They’re also cluttering up your lists and reports. HubSpot protects you from sending to them again, but it doesn’t clean them out for you.

For soft bounces, HubSpot is more lenient. It will retry delivery and continue to allow future sends unless the address bounces repeatedly. After multiple consecutive soft bounces, HubSpot may eventually suppress the contact.

How to Fix Bounced Emails in HubSpot

Finding bounces is only half the battle. Here’s how to actually fix the problem.

Re-verify Bounced Email Addresses

Before you delete a bounced contact, it’s worth checking whether the address is actually valid. Sometimes a hard bounce is caused by a temporary server issue on the recipient’s end, or the bounce was triggered by a strict spam filter rather than a truly invalid address.

Use an email verification tool to check bounced addresses in bulk. This will tell you which ones are genuinely invalid and which might be recoverable. Truelist’s HubSpot integration makes this especially easy since you can validate your HubSpot contacts directly without any manual exporting.

Update or Remove Invalid Contacts

Once you’ve identified which contacts are truly invalid:

1. Delete contacts with confirmed invalid addresses. They’re never going to receive your emails, and they’re inflating your contact count.
2. Update contacts with typos. If you spot an obvious typo like @gmial.com, fix the email address and unbounce the contact in HubSpot (you can do this from the contact record).
3. Re-engage contacts who changed jobs. If a work email bounced, check if you have an alternative email or can find their updated address through LinkedIn or other channels.

Segment Your Bounced Contacts

Not all bounces deserve the same treatment. Create separate lists to handle them appropriately:

• Hard bounces with invalid domains — delete these immediately
• Hard bounces with valid domains — worth re-verifying, as the address may have been recreated
• Repeat soft bounces — likely dead addresses that should be removed
• One-time soft bounces — keep these but monitor future sends

This segmented approach prevents you from accidentally deleting contacts that could still be reached.

How to Export and Clean Your HubSpot Contact List

If you want to do a thorough cleaning of your entire list, here’s the process.

1. Go to Contacts > Lists in HubSpot.
2. Create a list of all contacts (or a specific segment you want to clean).
3. Export the list as a CSV file by clicking Actions > Export.
4. Upload the CSV to Truelist at truelist.io for bulk email verification.
5. Review the results. Truelist will flag invalid, risky, and catch-all addresses.
6. Import the cleaned list back into HubSpot, removing or updating contacts as needed.

For a more detailed walkthrough of what list cleaning looks like in practice, see our guide on email list cleaning.

The manual export-clean-import cycle works, but it’s tedious and easy to forget. That’s where automation comes in.

Preventing Future Bounces with Proactive Validation

Fixing your current bounces is important, but the real win is making sure new bounces don’t pile up in the first place. Email lists decay at a rate of roughly 25-30% per year, so a list that’s clean today will have problems six months from now if you’re not actively maintaining it. We wrote about this in depth in our post on why validating once isn’t enough.

Here are the key strategies to keep your HubSpot bounce rate low:

Validate Emails at the Point of Entry

Add real-time email validation to your HubSpot forms so that typos and fake addresses are caught before they ever enter your database. This single step can eliminate a huge percentage of future hard bounces.

Set Up Recurring List Validation

Instead of waiting for bounces to happen, validate your entire contact list on a regular schedule. Truelist’s recurring validation feature automates this process. Connect your HubSpot account, set a validation schedule (monthly or quarterly works well for most teams), and let it run in the background. Invalid contacts get flagged automatically before they have a chance to bounce.

Monitor Your Email Health Dashboard

Make it a habit to check HubSpot’s email health tab at least once a week. Watch for:

• Bounce rate trending upward — a sign your list is decaying
• Sudden spikes in bounces — could indicate a bad list import or a bulk domain expiration
• Soft bounces converting to hard bounces — contacts that need to be removed

Clean Up Inactive Contacts

Contacts who haven’t opened or clicked an email in 6-12 months are at higher risk of bouncing. They may have abandoned their inbox or their employer may have deactivated the address. Run a re-engagement campaign, and if they still don’t respond, move them to a suppression list.

For more on how bounce issues connect to broader email deliverability problems, our dedicated guide covers the full picture.

Keep Your HubSpot List Clean Automatically

Dealing with bounced emails in HubSpot doesn’t have to be a constant fire drill. The most effective approach is to stop bounces before they happen by validating your contacts proactively and on a recurring schedule.

Truelist’s HubSpot integration connects directly to your HubSpot account and validates your contact list automatically. Set it up once, choose your validation frequency, and let it catch invalid addresses before they bounce and damage your sender reputation.

Start cleaning your HubSpot list with Truelist →