Automatic pausing

A burst of bounces or spam complaints damages your reputation and can get an entire sending account throttled by mailbox providers. SpacePost watches your recent mail and pauses your team before that happens, well below the thresholds at which Amazon SES starts a review (10% bounce, 0.5% complaint).

Thresholds

Measured over your last 1,000 sent emails, and only once you have sent at least 100:

Condition	Pause when
Bounces	more than 5% of those emails bounced and at least 10 bounces
Complaints	more than 0.2% drew a complaint and at least 3 complaints

The check runs every time a bounce or complaint is recorded.

What a pause does

• POST /emails and POST /emails/batch return 403 sending_paused with the reason, for example: “Sending is paused for this team: Bounce rate 7.2% over your last 500 emails.”
• Emails already queued fail with email.failed instead of being sent.
• SMTP sessions are rejected with a permanent error.
• Reading data (emails, domains, webhooks) and the dashboard keep working.

Recovering

1. Open the dashboard banner or the email log to see why: look at which recipients bounced or complained.
2. Fix the cause: clean the list, remove purchased addresses, stop mailing disengaged users, fix a broken signup form accepting typos.
3. Email support@spacepost.dev with what happened and what you changed. A person reviews the account and resumes sending.

Stay far from the line

Healthy senders see under 2% bounces and under 0.1% complaints. Verify addresses at signup, use double opt-in and act on email.bounced webhooks.

Tenants (platform mode)

If you send for your own customers with tenants, each tenant has its own guard with the same thresholds, measured over that tenant’s last 1,000 emails. A tenant that crosses them is paused on its own: its sends return 403 sending_paused while your team and your other tenants keep sending. Tenant mail is not counted in your team’s own check.

You can pause and resume tenants yourself. To resume a tenant that was paused for its bounce or complaint rate, your team needs to be trusted; otherwise POST /tenants/{ref}/unpause returns 403 invalid_access and you should contact support after fixing the cause.

Content filtering and other safety checks are described in Account verification and sending limits.