Unable to unbounce valid contacts on HubSpot Free

Marketing & Content Hub Email Deliverability
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Hi HubSpot Community,

I’m using HubSpot’s Free Tools and I have several contacts who have historical hard bounces, but their email addresses are valid and active now.

Example:

The hard bounce is from 9 February 2024 and the recorded reason is:

Hard bounced — Unknown user
Server response: 554 5.2.3 MailPolicy violation Error delivering to mailboxes

However, Scott has since emailed us from this same email address in March 2026, so I know the mailbox is active and the email address is correct.

I’m a Super Admin, but on the contact record I only see:

Contact has bounced.

There is no Unbounce option.

I have also checked the following:

  • Email hard bounce reason: Unknown user
  • Quarantined Emails: no value
  • The contact is not currently subscribed to our marketing communications.
  • There are no recent marketing emails showing in the contact timeline.
  • The original bounce is from 2024, so it is quite old.

This is not an isolated case — I have several contacts in the same situation, which makes me think this may be a limitation of the Free Tools rather than an issue with the individual contacts.

I contacted HubSpot Sales Chat and was told that, as a Free Tools user, my available support is through the Knowledge Base, Academy and Community.

My questions are:

  1. Is this contact potentially a global bounce or otherwise permanently blocked?
  2. Is there a way to unbounce these contacts while using HubSpot Free?
  3. If not, is there any way for HubSpot Support to remove the bounce, given that the email addresses have since been confirmed as active?
  4. Would a Marketing Hub Professional trial allow me to unbounce these contacts, or is that not available during a trial?
  5. Is there a recommended workflow for handling multiple legitimate contacts who have old hard bounces but are now confirmed to have valid email addresses?

I don’t want to create duplicate contacts or change their email addresses because, in these cases, the existing addresses have been confirmed to be valid.

Thanks!

Please note - this post has been edited by a Community moderator to ensure it adheres to our Community Guidelines.

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Hi @Alixe,

Happy to help here.

  1. It’s not a good idea to share email addresses of users who haven’t consented to this type of sharing publicly in a forum. cc @CommunityTeam - generally, the HubSpot support team (available in paid subscription) can confirm these types of questions.
  2. Unfortunately not, no. It’s limited to Marketing and Content Hub Professional and Enterprise. Send emails to contacts who previously bounced
  3. Not on the free tier, no.
  4. Yes, it should.
  5. No, the same “rules” as above apply.

(Don’t shoot the messenger.)

Best regards

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Thanks, you are right. When I tried to edit the post, someone else had already edited it, so now is ok. Thanks for highlighting it.

5

Hello @Alixe,

Welcome to the Community! :partying_face:

Also thank you @karstenkoehler for the tag and your help here so far!

As Karsten has noted, its best practice to not share any personal info of your own or your customers in the public forums. I’ve edited your post for you to remove that. He’s also noted, your best bet here for continued support/ would likely be an upgrade. However, to answer each question individually:

1.) I took a look on the backend and confirm the example contact is not globally bounced. They are only bounced in your portal. Meaning due to multiple dropped emails only sent from your portal, their email address is now blocked from sending from your portal specifically.

2 +3 .) From the community we can typically handle individual cases of unbouncing, typically for Users within your portal. This is usually for HubSpot Users with bounced addresses who are not receiving account notifications, login codes, etc.

We’re unable to bulk unbounce and we’re unable to individually unbounce portal contacts without evidence that they’ve explicitly agreed to receive your marketing emails. This would be best handled with support.

While 1:1 emails sent through your personal inbox (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) may go through, marketing emails are sent via HubSpot’s servers using your domain. Often, a bounce occurs because the recipient’s email server is configured (intentionally or not) to block these types of emails. Continuing to send marketing emails to addresses that bounce will negatively impact your overall sending reputation.

With a paid subscription, you can manually unbounce a contact record yourself, once. Beyond that, Support can assist with additional unbounces, provided you can verify the contact’s consent and ensure the issue won’t reoccur.

4.) Theoretically, yes. You should have access to the unbounce feature on your own and access to support in the interim.

5.) As Karsten has noted, this applies to all of the above. The only other thing I’d note here is that the bounce is tied to the email address. If you’re able to verify a better address for the contact, you could replace their primary emails address.

Hope this helps!

Sam, Community Manager