How is my AutoSend account health measured?

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The two signals

• Bounce rate. The percentage of your emails that mailbox providers reject. Hard bounces usually mean the address is invalid or no longer exists. A high bounce rate tells providers your list is stale or was never verified.
• Complaint rate. The percentage of recipients who mark your email as spam. Even a tiny complaint rate has an outsized impact, because mailbox providers treat spam reports as the strongest negative signal a recipient can send.

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Bounce rate thresholds

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Complaint rate thresholds

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What happens at each stage

• Healthy. Everything works normally. Your daily sending limits continue to grow as your domains warm up.
• Warning. You’ll be notified so you can act before the problem grows. Treat a warning as an early signal, not background noise. Accounts that respond at this stage almost never get flagged.
• Flagged. Your account is at serious risk. Pause your campaigns, identify the source of bounces or complaints, and clean your lists before resuming.
• Critical. This is your last chance to act before suspension. Stop all sending, remove invalid and unengaged contacts, and don’t resume until you’ve found the root cause.
• Suspended. Sending is disabled across your account. Bounce-related suspensions can be reviewed and lifted once you’ve fixed the underlying issue. Complaint-related suspensions above 0.1% may not be removed.

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How to keep your rates under control

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Do’s

• Use double opt-in. Confirmed subscribers bounce less and almost never mark your email as spam.
• Clean your lists regularly. Remove addresses that hard bounced and contacts who haven’t engaged in months. AutoSend automatically adds hard bounces to your suppression list, so never work around it.
• Send to engaged segments. Use segments to target contacts who have opened or clicked recently instead of blasting your entire list.
• Warm up new domains. Follow the domain warmup process so mailbox providers learn to trust your domain gradually.
• Make unsubscribing easy. A visible one-click unsubscribe link is your friend. A recipient who unsubscribes doesn’t hurt you. A recipient who can’t find the link marks you as spam instead.
• Set expectations at signup. Tell people what you’ll send and how often, then stick to it.
• Monitor your metrics after every send. Check your bounce and complaint rates in email activity and campaign analytics so you catch problems while they’re small.

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Don’ts

• Don’t buy, rent, or scrape email lists. Purchased lists are the fastest route to both high bounces and high complaints, and they violate AutoSend’s terms.
• Don’t email old lists without re-permission. A list that hasn’t been mailed in over a year is full of dead addresses and people who forgot they subscribed. Run a re-permission campaign first.
• Don’t hide or bury the unsubscribe link. It doesn’t reduce unsubscribes. It converts them into spam complaints.
• Don’t spike your sending volume suddenly. Sharp volume jumps from any domain look suspicious to mailbox providers and amplify the damage of any list problem.
• Don’t ignore warnings. The warning stage exists to give you time to fix things. Waiting until your account is flagged leaves you very little room.
• Don’t keep sending to non-openers indefinitely. Unengaged contacts are where complaints come from. Sunset them after a defined period of inactivity.
• Don’t use misleading subject lines or sender names. Recipients who feel tricked into opening report the email as spam.

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Frequently asked questions