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 DiazMail 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. DiazMail also adds up each account's sends of the last 7 days, so sends that each stay just under the levels add up too.

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. An admin of this server unblocks it from the admin page.

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.