List Hygiene
How Bitelio handles bounces and spam complaints, and what you can do to keep your list clean
To protect your sender reputation, Bitelio keeps a constant eye on the bounce and complaint rates of the emails you send. Letting either rate climb hurts deliverability — and if it climbs far enough, it can result in your account being suspended.
Bounce Management
An email bounces when it can't be delivered to the recipient's inbox. Every bounce is recorded on the contact as an email.bounce event, but automatic unsubscription happens only on permanent (hard) bounces. A transient (soft) bounce leaves the subscription untouched, since the upstream mail server usually retries delivery on its own.
Types of Bounces
| Type | Description | Auto-unsubscribes? |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent (hard) | Permanent delivery failure — invalid address, blocked domain, recipient rejected. | Yes |
| Transient (soft) | Temporary delivery failure — mailbox full, server unavailable, greylisted. | No |
| Undetermined | The upstream provider couldn't classify the bounce. | No |
Every bounce, whatever its type, emits an email.bounce event that workflows and webhooks can react to — the payload's bounceType field tells you which kind you're dealing with.
Preventing bounces
- Verify email addresses at the point of signup, before they ever land on your list.
- Prune your list on a regular basis: pull unengaged contacts into a segment, then re-confirm or drop them.
- Use a workflow to build a confirmation flow — send a verification email and only mark the contact confirmed once they've clicked through.
Complaint Management
A complaint is a recipient hitting the spam button on your email in their inbox provider. Whenever Bitelio is notified of one, the contact is always automatically unsubscribed, and an email.complaint event is recorded on them.
Mailbox providers weigh complaints far more heavily than bounces — even a modest complaint rate can drag down your sender reputation and deliverability.
Preventing complaints
- Send content your audience actually finds relevant and useful.
- Every marketing email needs a clear, functional unsubscribe link — for
MARKETINGtemplate and campaign types, Bitelio adds one automatically. - Watch your sending frequency so contacts don't feel flooded.
- Only email people who genuinely opted in — never scraped, purchased, or long-stale lists.