Bounces, complaints and pauses

Bounces

A hard bounce means the address doesn't exist or can't receive email. The contact becomes bounced and never gets another email, and Botensten Mail remembers the address for every sender for 180 days. A soft bounce, like a full mailbox, is temporary and changes nothing.

Spam complaints

When a reader marks your email as spam, most inboxes report it: the contact becomes complained and never gets another email. Gmail only reports a spam rate for each sending domain, without naming anyone. Inboxes count complaints against you: Google asks senders to stay under 0.1% and never reach 0.3%.

When a send pauses

A campaign pauses by itself when more than 2% of its emails hard bounce (at least 5) or more than 0.08% are marked as spam (at least 2), and you get an email about it. Emails already sent stay sent. Look at the campaign's report: if you know why, resume it from its page to send the rest. Once resumed, only the block level below stops it again.

The first slice of a send to contacts you never emailed follows the same rule before the rest goes out. First sends in steps

When an account is blocked

Past 5% hard bounces (at least 10) or 0.3% complaints (at least 3), the whole account is blocked. So is an account whose email reaches a spam trap, an address that exists only on bought, scraped or old lists. Botensten Mail also adds up each account's sends of the last 7 days, so sends that each stay just under the levels add up too, as does a high spam rate reported by Gmail.

A blocked account stops everything: every newsletter's sends, welcome and confirmation emails, imports, new contacts and its tracked links. You can still pause, unschedule and change billing. Chat with us from the dashboard's banner: we review it and unblock it when it's safe.

Keeping bounces and complaints low

• Only email people who signed up for your newsletter, and never a bought or scraped list.
• Keep confirmed opt-in on, so typos and fake signups never join.
• Keep list cleanup on, so readers who stopped opening stop getting issues.
• Before importing an old list, import it as dormant and mark the readers you know as active.
• Send from your own domain with a DMARC record. Sender addresses and domains
• Send regularly, so readers remember who you are.

Botensten Mail publishes its customers' delivery, bounce and spam rates, every day, on the deliverability page.