Why bounces matter
A bounce is an email that was accepted by your provider and then rejected afterwards — usually hours later — because the address does not exist or the mailbox refused it. Mailbox providers watch how often you do this. Repeatedly mailing dead addresses is the single fastest way to get your sending domain throttled or blocked, and because every organization on SalesFury sends through its own provider, that damage lands on you, not on anyone else.
What SalesFury does automatically
When a bounce comes back, SalesFury marks the original message Bounced and decides whether to suppress the address. Once an address is suppressed, every future send to that contact is blocked — one-off emails, sequences, and campaign steps alike.
The four kinds of bounce
- Hard — permanent. The address does not exist. Suppressed immediately.
- Soft — temporary. Mailbox full, server down, greylisted. Not suppressed straight away: a full mailbox is routinely transient, so cutting off a real prospect on the first failure would cost you business. The address is suppressed only after 5 consecutive soft bounces.
- Complaint — the recipient pressed "this is spam". Suppressed and recorded as an unsubscribe, because a spam report is a withdrawal of consent under CAN-SPAM.
- Block — the receiving server rejected the message on policy or reputation grounds. This is about your sending domain, not about the recipient, so the message is recorded but the contact is never suppressed. Suppressing here would punish valid prospects for a problem at your end. If you see a lot of these, check Email Authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC).
Spotting a suppressed contact
Open the contact. A suppressed address shows a red 📮 Email suppressed — undeliverable banner with the reason and the date, and the Email channel shows a Bounced badge. The 📧 Email card lower down lists the actual messages, with the bounce reason in red against the one that failed.
This is deliberately kept separate from an opt-out. The contact never asked you to stop — the address simply could not be reached — so consent records stay untouched.
Fixing a bad address
- Correct the email address on the contact.
- Click Clear suppression in the red banner.
Clearing is logged to the activity timeline with your name on it. Only clear it if the address has genuinely changed — re-sending to a known-dead address puts you straight back into reputation trouble.
Where bounces come from
If your organization sends through an API provider such as SendGrid, Mailgun or Amazon SES, the bounce notice goes to them, not to us. You must point that provider's event webhook at SalesFury or bounces will never arrive. See Bounce & Complaint Webhook Setup.
Checking your suppression list
Settings → Email shows how many contacts are currently suppressed. A number that climbs steadily usually means a stale imported list — run those addresses through Validate Email Addresses Before You Send before your next campaign.