Bounces, complaints & suppression

When an email can’t be delivered — or a recipient marks it as spam — RadarSend records it and, for the serious cases, automatically stops sending to that address. This protects your sender reputation so your good mail keeps reaching the inbox. This guide explains what each signal means, what RadarSend does on its own, and the two settings pages you can tune.

What these mean#

• Hard bounce (permanent). The address is dead — the mailbox doesn’t exist, the account was closed or disabled, or the domain can’t be found. It will never accept mail, so there’s no point trying again. RadarSend classifies these from the provider’s bounce code and wording (for example a 5.1.1 “user unknown” from Gmail).
• Soft bounce (transient). A temporary problem — the mailbox is full, the receiving server is throttling or greylisting you, or there’s a brief routing hiccup. These often clear up on their own, so RadarSend keeps the contact sendable and watches how often it recurs.
• Spam complaint. The recipient clicked “Report spam” (or “This is junk”) in their inbox, and their provider told us via a feedback loop. A complaint is an explicit “stop sending me this” — the strongest possible signal to leave someone alone.

RadarSend also handles a couple of edge cases automatically: a bounce caused by your sending IP being on a blocklist (not the recipient’s fault) never suppresses the contact, and a recipient’s mail admin blocking one specific From address blocks only that address, not the person entirely.

What RadarSend does automatically#

You don’t have to babysit this — the defaults are safe:

• Hard bounce → the contact is marked bounced and stops receiving mail. No further sends go out to a dead mailbox.
• Spam complaint → the contact is marked complained and stops receiving mail. A complaint is always treated as “never email again.”
• Soft bounces escalate gradually. RadarSend counts soft bounces over a rolling window and moves the contact up a ladder — Watch → At Risk → Archived — as they pile up. A single soft bounce won’t stop your mail; a persistent pattern eventually will. As a safety net, a string of bounces with no successful delivery in between will also archive an address even if it never trips the windowed count.

Deliverability and engagement are tracked separately — an address being archived for bouncing doesn’t change a contact’s lead score, and vice versa. All of these thresholds are yours to tune (below).

Your bounce policy#

Go to Settings → Deliverability → Bounce policy. This page holds the automated rules. The defaults are sensible, so only change them if you know why. Settings are grouped into three cards:

Transient escalation (how soft bounces add up):

• Rolling window — how far back soft bounces are counted. Default 14 days.
• Watch threshold — soft-bounce count that moves a contact to Watch (still sendable, monitored). Default 1.
• At-risk threshold — promotes to At Risk (volume reduced, still sending). Default 3.
• Suppress threshold — archives the contact (no more sends). Default 5.

Default outcomes (what happens per signal). Each is a dropdown of Healthy / Watch / At Risk / Archived:

• Unknown bounce — bounces we couldn’t classify. Default Watch.
• Permanent bounce — default Archived (strongly recommended — re-sending risks spam-trap flags).
• Complaint — default Archived.

Retries & recovery:

• Retry window — how long a single message keeps retrying before it’s marked failed. Default 48 hours.
• Hard-bounce spike alert — notify admins if one broadcast’s hard-bounce rate goes above this percentage. Default 2.0%; set 0 to disable.
• Unsuppress on engagement — if a suppressed contact later opens or clicks, automatically re-admit them to sends. Default Off.

Click Save policy to apply.

The suppression list#

Separate from per-contact status, RadarSend keeps a hard suppression list of email addresses that are blocked from every broadcast — regardless of the contact’s status or which segments they’re in. View it at Settings → Deliverability → Suppression.

• What’s on it. Spam complaints and hard bounces are added automatically; you can also add addresses yourself.
• Add an address. Type the Email (and an optional Reason) and click Add. Use this when someone asks to be removed by phone, email, or a legal request and you want them blocked everywhere.
• View the list. Entries appear in a table showing Email, Reason, and when they were Added.

A note on removing and searching: the Suppression page today is add-and-view only — there’s no in-page search box, and no button to delete an entry. To let a specific person receive mail again, open their contact record and use Reset status to Active, which clears bounces, unsubscribes, complaints, and Do-Not-Contact flags for that contact. (Re-sending to a previously hard-bounced or complained address can hurt your reputation, so do this only when you’re confident the address is good.)

Common issues#

• A good address got suppressed by mistake. This usually happens after a temporary problem looked permanent, or a one-off complaint. Open the contact and use Reset status to Active to clear the flags and make them sendable again. Only do this if you’re sure the mailbox is real and the person wants your email.
• High bounce rate on a brand-new list. A fresh, unverified, or purchased list will bounce heavily because many addresses are stale — and heavy bounces damage your reputation fast. Clean and validate the list before your first send, and start slow. See Deliverability & warmup.
• Why won’t a suppressed contact receive my mail? Suppressed and archived contacts are deliberately excluded from every send, even if they’re in your segment or list. That’s the whole point — it keeps you from mailing dead or complaining addresses. Check the contact’s status, and only reactivate if the address is genuinely good.

Good to know#

• Suppression protects your reputation. Every hard bounce and spam complaint you don’t stop tells mailbox providers you’re careless with your list — which sends all your mail toward spam. Letting RadarSend suppress automatically is the single easiest way to stay in good standing.
• Complaints are the loudest signal. Keep them rare by only emailing people who opted in, making unsubscribe easy, and sending relevant content. A rising complaint rate hurts far more than a few bounces.
• This ties directly into deliverability. Bounce and complaint rates are core inputs to your domain’s reputation and warming. For the bigger picture — warming a new domain, tracking reputation, and keeping inbox placement high — see Deliverability & warmup.