Why is my mailbox on hold?

What the mailbox hold is

The mailbox hold is a safety net on a single mailbox. When too many of the campaign emails it sends are refused by the receiving servers, EmailPal pauses that mailbox's campaign sending. It protects the mailbox and its domain from a bad list, and it does not touch your other mailboxes.

A held mailbox shows Sending paused in place of its status, and its page shows a banner: Too many of its emails were refused, so sending is paused. Warming keeps running while it is paused.

This is different from the campaign bounce pause. That pause stops one campaign, counts hard bounces, and has its own setting (5% by default, after 200 sends). The mailbox hold is not a campaign setting and applies whatever your campaign settings are. Auto-pause on bounces

When the hold triggers

The hold looks at the mailbox's last 7 days, rolling, not a calendar week. It divides the cold rejections by the completed outcomes, where a completed outcome is an email that was either delivered or finally bounced.

A warning email goes out earlier, at 3%. It needs the same minimum evidence as before: 100 or more completed outcomes, or at least 3 rejections.

The extra requirements under 100 outcomes keep a small sample from tripping the hold by chance. One bad address out of 20 sends is 5%, but it is not enough evidence on its own.

What counts and what does not

Only campaign mail counts: emails sent by your sequencer that got a final answer from the receiving server.

These count as rejections:

• Addresses that do not exist
• Mailboxes that are full
• Receivers refusing the message

These do not count:

• Deferrals, where the receiver asked us to try again later
• Emails that expired in EmailPal's own queue before the receiver answered
• Refusals of EmailPal's own network by a provider, such as Microsoft or Spamhaus-style blocks
• Receivers refusing EmailPal's own sending range, for example a protected-domain filter that says unauthenticated mail is not allowed from this range or asks for the range to be whitelisted
• Mailivery peer warming, which never counts

A refusal of our range says nothing about your list, so it is not held against your mailbox.

The warmup tag

If support shows you a log line for one of your sends with a warmup tag, that does not mean the email was warming. On a mailbox that is not yet campaign-ready, the tag is only a routing and attribution label. The email was still your prospect's mail, and it counts toward the hold like any other campaign email. When is a mailbox ready to send?

Health score and the hold are separate

The health score and the inbox rate are Mailivery placement measures. They show how EmailPal's warming mail lands in inboxes. The hold measures something else: how many of your real campaign emails the receiving servers refused. So a mailbox can have a health score of 100 and still be held, for example when a list full of dead addresses was sent from it. Campaign-ready placement

What happens while it is paused

• New campaign mail from the mailbox is refused with a 550 error, and the sequencer shows it as failed.
• Cold emails that were already queued for the mailbox are cancelled.
• Cancelled and failed emails are not sent later on their own. Send them again after you resume.
• EmailPal warming keeps running.

Your other mailboxes keep sending. Campaigns that use more than one mailbox carry on with the ones that are not held. The banner on the mailbox page shows how many queued emails were cancelled and how many sends were refused since the pause.

How to resume

Open the mailbox and use Resume sending. In the mailbox list, a held mailbox says Select to resume, and you can resume it from there.

Resuming does two things:

• It restarts the counting window, so the rejections that tripped the hold are not counted again.
• It gives the mailbox a 7-day period in which the hold cannot fire again, so you have time to fix the list.

After those 7 days the normal rules apply again. If the same problem is still in the list, the mailbox can be held again.

What to fix before you resume

1. Remove the addresses that bounced.
2. Verify the rest of the list before it goes out again. Importing leads and verification, Verification verdicts
3. Resume the mailbox, then resend the emails that were cancelled or failed while it was paused.

How to see what counted

The mailbox page shows the hold banner with the counts since the pause, but it does not list individual messages. Support can give you the message-level detail for the evidence behind a hold: the Message-ID, the recipient domain and the SMTP response from the receiving server for each rejection. Open a support ticket and name the mailbox.

FAQs

Is the hold a restriction on my domain?

No. It is per mailbox and it only pauses campaign sending from that mailbox. If a receiver refuses a whole domain, the mailbox page shows that instead: it says the domain was refused and when it restarts, and Resume is off until the rest period ends.

Can a mailbox be held with fewer than 100 sends?

Yes, but only on stronger evidence. With fewer than 100 completed outcomes in the last 7 days, the hold needs at least 3 rejections and a rejection rate of 10% or more. The 5% threshold applies once the mailbox has 100 or more completed outcomes.

Does warming traffic count toward the hold?

No. Mailivery peer warming never counts, and EmailPal warming keeps running while the mailbox is paused. Only campaign mail from your sequencer counts.

Can I turn the mailbox hold off?

No. Unlike the campaign bounce pause, it is not a setting. Auto-pause on bounces

Will the mailbox resume on its own?

No. You resume it yourself once you have cleaned the list.

Can the mailbox be held again straight after I resume?

Not for 7 days. Resuming starts a fresh count and a 7-day period where the hold cannot fire. After that, the 7-day window and the thresholds apply as normal.

Do receiver deferrals count?

No. A deferral is not a final answer, so it is not counted as a rejection or as a completed outcome.

Need more help?

Auto-pause on bounces, Sender bounces, Campaign launch checklist, Open a support ticket.