Why Your Marketing Email Sending May Be Limited

To protect your sender reputation — and make sure your emails keep reaching real supporters — BetterUnite watches your recent bounce rate and may temporarily limit large marketing sends if it climbs too high. This article explains how that works, and how to keep sending (and recover) when a limit is in effect.

What Is a Bounce?

A “bounce” is an email that couldn’t be delivered. There are three kinds:

• Hard bounce — the address is invalid, closed, or doesn’t exist. These never succeed, so we remove them automatically (see below).
• Soft bounce — a temporary problem, like a full mailbox or a server that’s briefly down. These often succeed on a later send.
• Blocked bounce — the receiving server rejected the message, usually for reputation or content reasons rather than a bad address.

Why Bounces Matter

Mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and others) treat a high bounce rate as a signal that a sender isn’t maintaining a clean list. When your bounce rate is high, it can cause:

• More emails landing in spam
• Slower delivery
• Lower inbox placement
• Server-level blocks
• Reduced sender reputation
• Fewer supporters receiving your future messages

Keeping bounces low protects everyone’s ability to reach the inbox.

What Bounce Rate Is Healthy?

How BetterUnite Evaluates Sending Health

We look at a trailing 30-day window of your marketing sends and review three numbers across all of them:

• How many recipients you targeted
• How many emails were delivered
• How many bounced

If your organization has targeted at least 500 recipients in that window and your bounce rate is over 15%, large marketing sends may be limited until your rate improves.

Because the window rolls forward day by day, your rate improves on its own as older, high-bounce campaigns age out of the last 30 days — even before you do anything. When you’re limited, the app shows you the date your oldest campaign leaves the window and what your rate will be afterward.

Important: when sending is limited, the limit applies only to your unproven recipients. Contacts you’ve recently reached successfully — your engaged, known-good audience — don’t count against it. The next two sections explain exactly how.

Can I Still Send Emails? Yes — and Your Best Contacts Don’t Count Against the Limit

While your sending is limited, contacts who are known-good (see Who counts as known-good? below) can always be emailed — no matter how many of them there are. The limit applies only to your remaining, less-proven recipients:

• Bounce rate over 15%: up to 1,000 other recipients per send
• Bounce rate over 20%: up to 250 other recipients per send

In other words, the cap is no longer a limit on your whole send — it’s a limit only on the untested addresses that tend to cause bounces. Your proven audience sends freely.

Examples

• 8,000 engaged contacts + 300 newer, unproven contacts → allowed. The 8,000 are exempt; the 300 fit under the 1,000 cap.
• 8,000 engaged contacts + 1,500 newer, unproven contacts → not yet. Trim the unproven group to 1,000 or fewer, or send only to your engaged audience.
• 40,000 engaged contacts, nothing else → allowed. Known-good contacts don’t count against the cap.

Who counts as known-good?

Any contact in your account who meets any of these — and isn’t unsubscribed, marked do-not-email, or already removed for bouncing:

• Opened or clicked one of your emails in the last 90 days
• Donated in the last 12 months
• Was added to your account in the last 30 days

These are the same audiences shown under Deliverability health → “Safe audiences to send to now” when you compose a marketing email, with live counts for your organization. Sending to them is both allowed while you’re limited and the fastest way to rebuild your reputation.

What Should I Send During Recovery?

Lead with your known-good audience — the three groups above. They’re exempt from the limit, they’re the least likely to bounce or complain, and every clean, well-received send helps your rate recover faster.

Then, if you want to reach beyond that audience, add only a small batch of newer or less-certain contacts each time — up to your current cap (1,000, or 250 above a 20% bounce rate). Keep those batches small and watch your rate come down before widening again.

Avoid, especially while limited:

• Full-database “send to everyone” blasts
• Old lists you haven’t emailed in a long time
• Purchased, rented, scraped, or third-party lists

What To Do Next

• You don’t need to remove hard bounces manually — invalid addresses are suppressed automatically the moment they bounce, and won’t be emailed again. Your rate still reflects them until those campaigns age out of the 30-day window.
• Don’t re-import addresses that previously bounced (for example, from an old spreadsheet).
• Clean new imports before uploading — check for typos, role addresses, and stale contacts.
• Send to your known-good audience first, then expand gradually.
• READ HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Recommended Recovery Plan

1. Start with your known-good audience (engaged, recent donors, recently added). These send freely, even while you’re limited.
2. Add only a small batch of newer contacts per send, within your current cap.
3. Watch your bounce rate after each send.
4. Keep imports clean and avoid re-adding known-bad addresses.
5. Let older high-bounce campaigns age out of the 30-day window — your rate drops on its own.
6. Widen your audience gradually as your rate falls.
7. Aim to bring your bounce rate below 5%, and ideally below 2%. Once you’re back under the threshold, full sending resumes automatically.

Still have questions about your organization’s sending health? Open the Deliverability health panel when composing a marketing email to see your current rate, which campaign is driving it, when it improves on its own, and your safe audiences to send to now.