# Handle bounces and spam complaints

Source: https://help.meisa.io/articles/bounces-and-complaints

Meisa handles bounces and spam complaints for you: a hard bounce or a spam report stops all future email to that address straight away, and temporary bounces pause email for a day and stop it after repeated failures. Your part is to make sure delivery tracking is on, so Meisa hears about bounces, and to keep your rates low.

## Make sure Meisa hears about bounces

Bounces and complaints come back from your provider. If tracking is not set up, Meisa never learns about them.

1. Open **Email setup**.
2. Next to your provider, open the **More actions** menu (the three dots).
3. Choose **Set up delivery tracking** and confirm.

For Amazon SES, Meisa creates a configuration set and a notification topic in your AWS account, so your access key needs permission to do that. See [Set up open and click tracking](/articles/set-up-open-and-click-tracking).

## What Meisa does with each bounce

**Hard bounce** (the address does not exist):

- The email is marked **Bounced**.
- The contact is unsubscribed right away, and the reason is saved on their timeline.
- The address goes on Meisa's suppression list, so none of your products, transactional email included, sends to it again.

**Temporary (soft) bounce** (mailbox full, server busy):

- Marketing-style email to that person pauses for 24 hours. Sequence emails wait and go out after the pause.
- After 3 soft bounces within 30 days, the contact is unsubscribed and the address is suppressed.

**Soft bounces that will not recover:**

- A mailbox the provider reports as disabled or inactive is suppressed for 90 days, then allowed again in case it comes back.
- A company mail server that rejects your email by policy stops that contact on the first bounce.

**Address with no mail server:** Meisa checks each address before sending. If the domain cannot receive mail, the email is not sent, the contact is unsubscribed, and the address is suppressed.

## What Meisa does with a spam complaint

When someone clicks **Report spam**:

- The email is marked as complained and the contact's status changes to **Marked as spam**.
- All their email preferences are switched off.
- The address is blocked in every product on your account, transactional email included.

This is final. Do not re-add or re-subscribe someone who reported you.

## See who bounced or complained

- **For a broadcast**: open the broadcast and scroll to **Didn't arrive**. You see **Bounced, the address doesn't exist**, **Couldn't be sent** and **Marked as spam after it arrived**, with the people behind each.
- **For one person**: open the contact. Their **Emails** tab shows each email's status.
- **Across your list**: on **Contacts**, use the status filter to show **Unsubscribed**, **Bounced**, **Marked as spam** or **Not subscribed (all)**. Contacts stopped by a hard bounce are listed as **Unsubscribed**, with the bounce as the reason on their timeline.

![Contacts list with the status filter](https://cdn.kamaan.io/kamaan/sites/6ae9f671d5ea373710b2366f/images/meisa-contacts-list-b88b09c7.webp)
## Keep your rates healthy

Your [sending health score](/articles/sending-health-score) watches the last 30 days:

- Bounce rate: keep it under 2%. Above 5% costs 40 points and shows **Fix now**.
- Spam complaints: keep them under 0.1%. At 0.3% or more, Gmail starts filtering and your score shows **Fix now**.

To bring them down:

1. Only send to people who signed up recently and expect your email.
2. Before importing an old list, remove addresses that have not engaged in a long time.
3. Make your unsubscribe link easy to find. People who cannot unsubscribe report spam instead.
4. Keep the [frequency cap](/articles/frequency-cap) on.

## A real address was suppressed by mistake

Re-subscribing the contact is not enough, because the address itself is on the suppression list. Email hi@meisa.io with the address and why you believe it now works. We will check it and lift the block if it is safe to send again.

## Related articles

- [Unsubscribes and suppressed addresses](/articles/unsubscribes-and-suppressed-addresses)
- [Understand your sending health score](/articles/sending-health-score)
- [Why was my email not sent?](/articles/why-was-my-email-not-sent)
- [Get webhooks for email events](/articles/set-up-webhooks)