Why did my sending slow down or pause?

Warmerly deliberately holds back or stops campaign sending when the numbers say your reputation is at risk. Once a domain starts landing in spam, everything from it suffers, including mail that had nothing to do with the bad list. Stopping early is far cheaper than recovering later, so Warmerly does it for you and emails you the reason.

There are five separate mechanisms. Find yours below. If your mailbox page or your Accounts page shows a banner saying sending is limited or paused, that is the fifth.

#1. The volume ramp (new mailboxes and new campaigns)

A new mailbox is not allowed to send its full daily limit on day one. Two things hold it back:

• The warmup ramp raises what a mailbox is allowed to do over its first 30 days. See How warmup works.
• The campaign volume ramp starts a campaign small and increases each sending day. It is switched on by default when a campaign is created and your mailboxes are less than 14 days into warmup, and you can change it on the campaign's Settings tab under Advanced, with the toggle Ramp volume up gradually. By default the first day is 3 emails per mailbox, then 1 more each sending day, up to a ceiling of 15. Weekends and other days you do not send on do not count as sending days.

This is not a fault. Your mailbox's daily sending limit (Settings tab of the mailbox) is only a ceiling, and a ramp can only hold sending below it, never above.

#2. The bounce brake (sending is throttled)

If a mailbox's bounce rate over the last 7 days climbs, Warmerly cuts that mailbox's daily campaign volume before it has to stop it:

The brake only applies once a mailbox has sent at least 25 emails in that 7-day window, because a few bounces on a tiny sample say nothing. It never drops below 1 a day, and it releases by itself as the bounce rate falls. The fix is on the list side: verify your addresses before you send.

#3. Automatic pause for high bounces (campaign, then mailbox)

At a bounce rate of 7% or more, or when 30% or more of the leads tried were rejected as undeliverable, over the last 7 days (again only after at least 25 sends), Warmerly pauses:

1. The campaign first. A bad list makes every mailbox that touches it look bad, and pausing the mailboxes would stop your other campaigns too. The campaign's status becomes paused. You resume it from the campaign page once the list is fixed.
2. A mailbox next, only if it is still bad after the bad campaigns are stopped. That means the problem follows the mailbox, not the list.

You get an email with the numbers that caused the pause and what to do. The pause happens even if that email cannot be sent.

#A mailbox paused for reputation keeps warming

A mailbox taken off campaigns for reputation is not stopped. Its status stays active, warmup keeps running (and is turned back on if it was off), and the badge on Accounts shows Recovering. The mailbox page says warmup is still running and that it will return automatically. Warmup is what rebuilds the reputation, so stopping it would remove the way back.

The mailbox returns to campaigns by itself when all of these are true, checked hourly:

• it has been off campaigns for at least 3 days,
• it has a recent health score (from the last 3 days) of 70 or more,
• its bounce rate is back under the pause level.

It comes back small: 5 emails a day, climbing by 5 a day, for its first 5 days, on top of any other limit. You get an email when it returns. If you press Resume yourself, the same gentle return applies, because choosing to send again is not a reason to jump back to full volume.

#4. Automatic pause when a provider refuses the message as spam

If a mailbox's messages are refused by the receiving server as spam or policy (rather than because the address does not exist), those leads are not marked bounced and are not suppressed. They are retried later. If a mailbox gets 3 of these refusals within 24 hours, it is taken off campaigns the same way (Recovering), and you are emailed. Nothing reached your recipients and your leads are fine. Look at your copy (links, spammy phrases), check the domain health card and ask your mail provider whether they are filtering outbound mail.

#5. Slowed or paused after a rise in failed deliveries or complaints

This applies to mailboxes Warmerly hosts for you (OneMail) and other mailboxes that send through our own mail servers. A mailbox you connected from your own provider, such as Gmail or Microsoft 365, sends through that provider, so this section does not apply to it. Nor does it apply to the free mailbox new accounts get, which has fixed, stricter limits instead (see Get a free sending mailbox).

For those mailboxes, Warmerly also watches what happens to the campaign mail each one sends: how much of it bounces, how much the receiving provider refuses as spam, and how many recipients report it as spam. It looks at the last day and the last week together, and it only acts when there is enough mail to judge, and one spam report is not enough on its own, so one person pressing "report spam" does not slow your mailbox down.

For one mailbox, it goes in steps:

• Usually you first get an email saying results are slipping, while sending carries on as normal. If the numbers are already high it may go straight to slowing sending down.
• If it keeps up, campaign sending from that mailbox is slowed to part of its usual daily volume.
• If it is still bad after that, the mailbox is paused: it comes off your campaigns, the same way as in section 3.

For a whole workspace, the same happens one level up when the problems are spread across its mailboxes. A workspace can be slowed, and if things do not improve, campaign sending is paused on every mailbox in it. Our team is told when that happens and may review the workspace. We will get in touch if we need anything from you.

What you see. The mailbox page (and, for a workspace, the Accounts page) shows a banner that says sending is limited or paused, what was measured in plain words, and what helps. We email you (unless you have turned off alert emails) when sending is slowed or paused.

How it comes back. Warmup keeps running the whole time, which is what rebuilds a mailbox's reputation. As the results stay healthy, sending is raised a step at a time, about a day apart, until it is back to normal. If our team is reviewing your workspace, it returns once that review is done. A paused mailbox returns the same way as in section 3, starting at a low volume. If our team changes your sending limits by hand, you get an email when they change them and another when they lift them.

What helps:

• Check the addresses before they go out again. Verify flags the ones that no longer exist.
• Remove old or purchased contacts. Lists that have sat for months, or were bought, are where most bounces and complaints come from.
• Send fewer emails for a few days. Smaller, steady volumes recover faster than big bursts.
• Review the content: links to new or shortened domains, attachments, heavy formatting and salesy phrases are what filters react to. Write only to people who are likely to want to hear from you, and make it easy to opt out.

If something in the banner or the email looks wrong, write to support@warmerly.com and a person will look at it.

#Other reasons sending stops that are not reputation

• The mailbox is Paused or Disconnected. See What do my mailbox's health score and status mean? and Reconnect a mailbox. A health score under 60 for two days also pauses a mailbox entirely, and it resumes itself after about three days.
• Billing or plan limits. See Plans & limits.
• Outside the sending window or days. See the troubleshooting checklist.

#What Warmerly does not do

• It does not pause on inbox placement results, because a placement test is too small a sample to stop your sending automatically. It acts on bounces, provider refusals and spam reports (section 5).
• It only counts spam reports that reach it. Most providers, Gmail included, never tell the sender who pressed "report spam", so a low count here does not prove nobody did.
• It cannot un-pause a campaign for you. Campaign pauses are resumed by you.

#Common problems

"My mailbox says Recovering and I did not do anything." That is one of the automatic pauses above. If the mailbox page shows a banner, it says which and why. An automatic pause returns by itself once the mailbox is healthy again, and the tips in section 5 get it there faster. If only one mailbox is affected, your other mailboxes keep sending.

"The banner says sending is paused across my workspace." That is the workspace level of section 5: campaign sending is paused on every mailbox in it, and warmup keeps running on all of them. The mailboxes return to campaigns once they are healthy again, and our team has been told and may review it.

"I resumed the mailbox and it barely sends." The return ramp is 5 emails a day, rising by 5, for 5 days. That is intentional.

"The brake is throttling a mailbox but my list is fine." Bounces count from any campaign that mailbox sent in the last 7 days, and hard bounces from old addresses are the usual cause.

#Related

• How our email infrastructure works: learn how our infrastructure protects reputation
• Launch your first campaign
• Deliverability checklist before you launch
• Suppression list