Lowering Your Bounce and Spam Rate

If you login to your account and see either or both of the following red notices, then as the notices say your bounce rate and/or spam rate is too high and needs to be lowered immediately. 

When this happens, both us at Prefinery and you are notified via email by the system. 

From our end, we go into a manual review of your project and will reach out to you about it. We check for irregularities and do our best to ensure you're making the most out of Prefinery. No worries, there's no automatic suspension, and we'll always contact you first if anything's of concern regarding your account.

On your end, even before we reach out to you, there are a couple of things you can check for and implement as follows: 

Note: While there isn't a way to reset it your bounce/spam rate, it should lower eventually as more valid users join your campaign and receives your emails without issues. Additionally, email stats (total sent, opens, clicks, bounces, spam, unsubscribes) are permanent and cannot be cleared as they retain deliverability history.

1

A verified return-path, while optional and if you haven't set it up yet, may help with improving the chances of your emails getting through some recipients. 

2

If you were testing your campaign, make sure to test with valid email addresses that you own. To prevent furthering your spam rate, you can suspend those invalid test users if they aren't automatically suspended already and/or delete them from your campaign. If you need to use mock data, you should use addresses at a domain you control, such as mock-user@yourdomain.com

If this wasn't due to testing, from your project dashboard, if you go to Email > Suppressions you'll find the users that either got hard bounced, unsubscribed, or submitted a spam complaint for the email you sent to them. 

If it's a bounce issue, there's a number of reasons on why that happened to them, but if you check each user's profile and notice the same IP address, location, browser and/or OS, there's chance these submissions are from the same person who's trying to game your setup with invalid email addresses.

To prevent or at least minimize these cases you can try limiting signups per IP, adding the person's IP address to your blocklist, adding reCaptcha to your form, or if necessary suspending the person. If these are legitimate users, you can check their profiles > Email tab to see why emails sent to them bounced as shown below: 

If it's a spam issue, check each of these user's profiles you'll find which email was last sent to them which made them unsubscribe or file a spam complaint. This will give you an idea on how to better improve your email message and make sure you don't come across as spammy or unexpected to them. 

If it indicates that your domain is on a blacklist, please refer to our guide here: Ensure your domain isn't on a blacklist

3

If you were importing a huge email list, make sure that these addresses have been prevalidated. If you had double opt-in turned off, make sure that these users had recently expressed consent to joining your campaign so they expect your email and will not mistakenly mark it as spam or unsubscribe immediately. This is defined in our Acceptable Use Policy here: https://www.prefinery.com/acceptable-use

4

If you've been spammed with fake signups, or by someone trying to game your referral system resulting into an increasing spam rate, we recommend using reCaptcha on your form if you haven't yet. You'll also want to adjust your fraud protection settings (via Settings > Project Settings > Fraud Protection), especially enabling the blocking of disposable emails and high-risk IP addresses, as well as adjusting signups/shares/referrals per IP.

5

Some of these spammers can be actual humans trying to submit your form for varying reasons. You'll want to review these users' profiles, and if a common IP address and/or email address domain is being used by them to spam you, you can enter them into the Email and/or IP Blocklists. The same goes for when the spammer is from a specific country which you don't need audience from anyways - you can add them in the Country Blocklist. 

6

Legitimate emails can be falsely flagged as spam/phishing despite  email best practices resulting into automated spam complaints and ]automatically unsubscribing the user from the emails even when the user themselves didn't want to. Hotmail, Outlook and Live are notable for this as an example. This can be resolved by enabling 2-click unsubscribe on your project: 

7

You can check out the other tips and best practices for improving email deliverability here.

Once you've done the above, your bounce/spam rate should lower eventually as more valid users join your campaign and receives your emails without issues. Your account will be in periodic review until you reduce your spam and/or bounce rates.