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 Postroom 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 2.5% 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, which the bell in the dashboard shows too, with a link to the campaign. 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, it only pauses again past 5% hard bounces (at least 10) or 0.3% complaints (at least 3), and then the rest of it can't go out. Notifications

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

Warnings

Postroom also adds up your sends of the last 7 days, so sends that each stay just under these levels add up too: past them, you get an email saying so. So you do when an email reaches a spam trap, an address that exists only on bought, scraped or old lists: Postroom never emails that address again.

When a test lands in spam

Inboxes are careful with a sender they don't know yet, and your first test email is often the first email they see from your domain, so it can land in spam even when everything is set up. Your readers' inboxes then learn from how they treat your issues: the ones they open and reply to, and the ones they mark as spam.

• Send from your own domain, with every record found on the Domains page. On Cloudflare, each record is set to DNS only. Your own domain
• In Gmail, open the test, click the three dots, then Show original: SPF, DKIM and DMARC should each say PASS. One that doesn't points to the record to fix.
• Use a from name your readers know, and link to your own website rather than a link shortener.
• Marking the test as not spam only teaches your own inbox, not your readers'.

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.