What do I do if my campaign is paused for high bounce rate?

If your campaign got paused because the bounce rate climbed too high, do not just click Resume. The bounce protection was doing its job — it stopped sending to protect your sender reputation across every inbox on your domain. If you resume without fixing the cause, you'll just burn through more reputation.

Steps to take

1. Look at what bounced

Open the campaign's Leads tab and filter by status: Bounced. You'll see every lead that failed to deliver.

Look at the bounce reasons:

• "Mailbox does not exist" / "Invalid recipient" — the email address is wrong or no longer active. List quality issue.
• "Mailbox full" / "Over quota" — real address but the person isn't managing it. Rare in cold email lists.
• "Spam rejected" / "Reputation error" — your inbox is being actively rejected. Deliverability issue, worse than a list issue.

The first category is usually the culprit.

2. Check the bounce rate

Under 3% is healthy. Over 5% is dangerous. Over 10% is catastrophic.

You can see this on the Analytics tab. If the rate is high, your list had a lot of invalid addresses.

3. Clean the list

Options:

• Run email verification on the remaining leads. The platform's verification catches most invalid addresses before sending. See Import leads — the Email Verification toggle.
• Remove bounced leads from the campaign. They're dead ends. Use bulk actions on the Leads tab.
• If the list came from a purchased source, consider throwing out the whole list. Purchased lists often have 20%+ invalid rates. The damage is already done to sender reputation for whatever got through.

4. Check inbox health scores

Go to Email Accounts. Look at the health score on each inbox that was sending from this campaign.

• If scores are still 80%+, reputation survived. Safe to resume once the list is cleaned.
• If scores dropped below 80%, the damage is done. Pause the affected inboxes from campaigns for 2-3 weeks while warmup rebuilds reputation.

5. Only then: resume the campaign

Once the list is cleaned and inbox health is intact, resume. Watch the Analytics tab carefully in the first day — if bounces spike again, pause immediately.

Preventing it next time

• Use email verification on every new list. Especially purchased or old lists.
• Keep bounce rate under 3% on every campaign. The AI agent flags anything higher — don't override it.
• Spread volume across inboxes (see distributing volume).

Related

• Bounce protection — more on how bounce protection works
• Deliverability — the full deliverability playbook
• Health & troubleshooting — recovering a burnt inbox
• Import leads — using email verification at upload