When sending is warned or paused

Applies when your sending is: Sent by Issue MintSent by Issue Mint, from your domain

Issue Mint watches the bounce and complaint rate on hosted sending and acts in two stages. A warning slows sending down and tells you what it is seeing. A pause stops it, and a person here has to lift it.

Both exist because mailbox providers judge everybody sending through Issue Mint as one sender, so a list in poor shape is a problem for other publishers as well as for its owner. The figures that trigger each stage are on the limits on hosted sending, and this page is what happens when one of them is reached.

What a warning means

A warned account keeps sending. It carries on at half its usual rate, and the issue in flight finishes going out.

You get an email naming the rate that caused it, which is either a complaint rate or a hard bounce rate. The point of the stage is that it gives you the chance to fix the cause yourself before anything stops, and the fix is almost always the same one: remove the addresses that have not opened or clicked anything in a year. The Sending tab reports the account as under watch while this lasts.

What a pause means

A pause stops hosted sending for the whole account, including test sends.

It happens automatically and immediately, because the same numbers are being watched by Amazon, and by the time Amazon acts it is the whole platform’s problem rather than one account’s. Two situations reach a pause without a rate being involved at all: a handful of complaints on one issue, and a send where a large share of the addresses bounced outright. Neither waits for a percentage, because a percentage of a few hundred recipients is noise, and both patterns are what a bought list looks like from outside.

What a pause never touches

A pause stops sending and nothing else. Your website stays up, your archive stays published, your subscriber list is exactly where you left it, and the composer and the dashboard work normally.

You can keep writing, keep collecting links, keep taking signups and keep selling sponsorships throughout. Nothing is deleted, nothing is hidden, and nothing about your plan or your bill changes. This is worth saying plainly because the word pause invites people to assume the worst, and the honest scope of it is one thing only.

Where in a send a pause takes effect

A pause takes effect between batches, never inside one, and never by trying to recall a message that has already gone.

Hosted sending goes out in batches of 200 recipients, and the pause is checked before each batch starts. So the recipients already handed to the mail servers received the issue, and the ones still queued did not. Nobody is mailed twice and the ledger of who got what stays intact, which matters when you come to read the issue report afterwards.

What happens to the issue that stopped

The issue is marked failed, with the reason on it, and the recipients it never reached stay queued.

Issue Mint does not finish that send later on its own, and there is no resume button in the product. That is the honest position rather than the tidy one: once a pause is lifted, getting the rest of that issue out is a conversation with us, not something the account can restart by itself. Everything else about the issue is intact, including its public page in your archive and the numbers for the recipients who did receive it.

How a pause is lifted

A pause is lifted by a person here, after reading what you tell them. Nothing lifts on a timer.

That is deliberate and it is not a queue you are waiting in for a fixed period. An automatic release, on a system whose whole job is to stop a bad list going out, would mean mailing that same list once every day for ever. Reply to the email you received, say what you know about where the list came from and when, and that is the fastest route through. When sending is released, the warm-up ramp on the account starts again from the beginning, because the history that earned the old daily ceiling is the history that is now in question.

When the pause was Amazon’s decision

There is a further state, shown as suspended, for when Amazon stopped the account rather than Issue Mint doing it.

It looks the same from your side and the effect on your newsletter is identical, but lifting it takes a change at Amazon as well as one here, so it can take longer and it is not always ours to grant. It is the state above a pause rather than a different kind of one. If you would rather these decisions and the reputation behind them were yours, what sending gives you sets out what moving to your own sending account changes, and choosing how you send covers when that is worth doing.