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 on a rolling window across all your campaigns and transactional sends, and intervenes when rates degrade.
What we measure and the limits
| Signal | What it is | Suspension limit | Healthy target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard bounce rate | Sent messages that bounced permanently (address doesn't exist, domain invalid, blocklisted). | 4% | well under 2% |
| Complaint rate | Sent messages recipients marked as spam. | 0.08% | well under 0.04% |
What you'll experience
Three escalating stages, in order:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Sending stays suspended until you request and are granted reinstatement. There is no time-based unlock. See Requesting reinstatement.
Transactional sending and SMS use separate channels and policies; an email suspension does not affect them.
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:
- Where the affected list came from — which signup form, which import, which export from another tool.
- What you've changed — removed segments, ran a verifier, switched sources, paused a problem flow.
- 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.
Related
- Domain verification — set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Authenticated mail bounces and complains less.