When an email bounces: what Current does with it
Sequence email and account-manager campaign email leave a person's own Microsoft 365 mailbox, so when an address is dead the bounce (a non-delivery report from the mail system) lands back in that inbox. Since September 10, 2026, Current reads those reports from every mailbox it syncs and turns each one into a record you can act on. Nothing about the report's wording is stored, only the failed address, the status code, and the short diagnostic line. A report only counts when Current itself sent to that address in the last 30 days (a sequence step, a campaign send, or a message from that mailbox); a bounce for an address Current never emailed is kept on file and changes nothing, so a forged bounce cannot block a real contact.
Hard bounces and soft bounces
| What came back | What Current does |
|---|---|
| A hard bounce (a 5.x.x code: the address does not exist, the domain is gone) | The address goes on the Do not email list as Bounced, which stops every kind of mail to it, including service notices and notifications. The contact's email badge turns to Invalid. A note lands on the contact's timeline. Any sequence the contact is in ends right then with the exit reason Bounced, a queued campaign send to the address is dropped, and a pending Outreach queue item for that step is cancelled. An invitation that has already gone out is left alone. |
| A soft bounce (a 4.x.x code: mailbox full, a temporary refusal) | A note on the contact's timeline, nothing else. Sends continue. |
| The third soft bounce for one address inside 30 days | Treated exactly like a hard bounce. Three temporary refusals in a month is an address nobody reads. |
How you hear about it
Once a day, the person who owns the sequence (or who sent the campaign) gets one bell: how many addresses bounced and were marked Do not email, which sequences they came from, and a link to the list filtered to bounces. It is never one bell per bounce. When no sequence or campaign can be matched, the bell goes to the owner of the mailbox the report landed in. The sequence report also carries a Bounced line in its exits breakdown, separate from Unsubscribed.
Fixing an address
Change the contact's email to a different address and the Invalid badge clears on its own; the old address stays on the Do not email list for good. Run Verify on the contact and, if NeverBounce says the same address is valid after all, the bounce entry is lifted; only a verification result lifts it, not a status typed by hand. Entries that came from a Resend bounce, a spam complaint, or a person's own unsubscribe click are never lifted this way.
Deactivating the contact in your PSA (optional, off by default)
Under Integrations, in your PSA's drawer, an admin can turn on Contacts: deactivate on a hard bounce. With it on, a hard bounce also marks the contact inactive in Current and, for Autotask, sets the contact inactive in your PSA through the same CRM write guard every other push uses. A fixed address does not reactivate the PSA contact; a person does that by hand. ConnectWise and HaloPSA workspaces get the Current-side flag only for now.
Tidying the bounce messages out of the inbox
A report Current could tie to something it sent is moved to the mailbox's Deleted Items once it has been read, so the inbox stays clean. A notice it cannot tie to anything — backscatter, or a report about an address Current never emailed — is read, changes nothing, and stays where it is. Moving a report needs one extra Microsoft permission on the Current app, Mail.ReadWrite, granted as an application permission by your Microsoft administrator. Without it, bounces are still read and acted on; the messages simply stay where they were, and the Staff mailboxes panel notes it under that mailbox. On the first pass over a mailbox Current also looks back seven days so bounces that arrived before this shipped are caught, and once the permission lands it walks those seven days again so the notices it had to leave behind get tidied too.
- 1Open the Current app in Microsoft EntraEntra admin center → Enterprise applications (or App registrations) → Current → API permissions. This is the same place your administrator granted Mail.Read when mailbox capture was set up.
- 2Add Mail.ReadWrite as an Application permissionAdd a permission → Microsoft Graph → Application permissions → Mail.ReadWrite. Application, not Delegated: Current reads staff mailboxes with the organisation's consent, not each person's sign-in.
- 3Grant admin consentClick Grant admin consent for your organisation. Microsoft applies it to the next token Current fetches, which can take up to an hour; the note under each mailbox on the Staff mailboxes panel clears on the first sync that moves a notice.