Delivery failures and spam reports. A good sender suppresses addresses that bounce or complain to protect reputation.
Bounces and complaints feed back into your sending reputation, which feeds back into deliverability. A clean return-path is what makes them visible.
Bounces vs complaints
A bounce is a delivery failure reported back by the receiving server. A hard bounce is permanent — the address doesn’t exist or the domain is gone — and should be suppressed immediately. A soft bounce is temporary, like a full mailbox or a server hiccup, and may clear on retry. A complaint is different: the message was delivered, but the recipient marked it as spam. Complaints are the more dangerous signal, because mailbox providers weigh them heavily when scoring your domain.
Why it matters
Mailbox providers treat your bounce and complaint rates as a proxy for whether people want your mail. Let them climb and your legitimate replies start landing in spam — or get rejected outright. Suppressing bad addresses isn’t just hygiene; it’s how you protect the deliverability of every other message you send, including the support replies customers are waiting on.
How to handle it
- Capture bounce and complaint notifications via a clean Return-Path so feedback actually reaches you.
- Suppress hard bounces and complaints automatically, and stop sending to them.
- Authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so genuine mail isn’t mistaken for abuse in the first place.
For example, an e-commerce store that emails order updates from a support address will accumulate dead addresses over time; without suppression, every send to those addresses drags its reputation down and pushes real replies toward the spam folder.
How Cherryrise handles it
Cherryrise signs outbound mail as your own domain with BYODKIM and surfaces deliverability signals so bounces and complaints are visible — and acted on — instead of quietly eroding your sending reputation. Because the mail is authenticated as you, the feedback you receive reflects your own domain’s standing, which is the number that decides whether your support replies reach the inbox or the spam folder.