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Sender Reputation

Arsel customers share sending infrastructure, so one organization's poor list quality affects deliverability for everyone. To protect that, Arsel monitors sending health over a rolling 30-day window covering your campaigns and transactional sends together, and intervenes when rates degrade.

What we measure and the limits​

SignalWhat it isSuspension limitHealthy target
Hard bounce rateSent messages that bounced permanently (address doesn't exist, domain invalid, blocklisted).4%well under 2%
Complaint rateSent messages recipients marked as spam.0.08%well under 0.04%

Reading your bounce rate​

Your analytics split bounces into three parts:

  • Hard — permanent failures: the address doesn't exist or the domain is invalid.
  • Soft — temporary failures: a full mailbox, or a receiving server that was briefly unavailable.
  • Validator-rejected — addresses Arsel's email validation flagged as undeliverable at send time, before delivery was attempted.

Validator-rejected addresses are marked undeliverable so you stop sending to them, but — unlike hard bounces — they do not count toward the hard bounce rate above that triggers auto-cancellation or suspension.

What you'll experience​

Three escalating stages, in order:

  1. Campaign auto-cancellation. A single campaign with unusually high bounce or complaint rate is cancelled mid-send. Remaining recipients aren't sent to, the campaign moves to Cancelled with a reason, and admins are emailed. Hard-bounced addresses are auto-added to your suppression list. Treat this as the first warning that a list needs attention.
  2. At-risk warning. If your overall rates drift toward the suspension limits, admins receive a one-time email per episode with current rates, volume, and the suspension limits for context. You can keep sending — but further degradation leads to suspension.
  3. Account suspension. If rates continue to degrade, or multiple campaigns are auto-cancelled in a short window, email sending is suspended: scheduled/queued/in-flight campaigns are cancelled, new sends are rejected, the dashboard shows a notification, and admins are emailed.
Suspension is not automatic recovery

Sending stays suspended until you request and are granted reinstatement. There is no time-based unlock. See Requesting reinstatement.

An email suspension covers all email — transactional sends are rejected too, with 403 and name: sending_suspended. Other channels are governed separately: SMS, WhatsApp and push are unaffected.

Keeping your reputation healthy​

Almost every reputation incident traces back to list quality. Stick to these:

  • Only send to opted-in contacts. Purchased, scraped, or "found somewhere" lists are the biggest source of bounces and complaints. If you can't point to where and when each contact opted in, treat that list as a liability.
  • Re-validate older lists. Addresses go stale. Before mailing a list you haven't used in months, run it through a verifier (NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, Bouncer) or send to a small slice first and check the bounce rate.
  • Remove disengaged contacts. Recipients who haven't opened or clicked in 6+ months are a complaint risk even if the address still works. Suppress them or run a re-engagement flow first.
  • Don't re-import unsubscribes. Arsel removes unsubscribed contacts automatically, but if you import from another tool, make sure unsubscribed contacts there aren't re-added as active.

Hard-bounced addresses are automatically suppressed and won't be sent to again, so the same addresses can't re-bounce on your next campaign. This means the path to recovery isn't "wait it out" — it's to stop importing fresh dirty data.

Requesting reinstatement​

Reply to the suspension email or contact support@arsel.sa. Reviews are manual; including the following speeds them up materially:

  1. Where the affected list came from — which signup form, which import, which export from another tool.
  2. What you've changed — removed segments, ran a verifier, switched sources, paused a problem flow.
  3. Evidence — a report from NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, Bouncer, or similar; or a pre/post-cleanup count.

After reinstatement, evaluations look only at sends from that point forward. Repeat incidents lead to longer reviews and may lead to permanent closure.

  • Domain verification — set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Authenticated mail bounces and complains less.