Suppression List Bounce Blocked by ESP
Meaning
Your Email Service Provider (ESP) blocked the email from being sent because the recipient address is on their internal suppression list due to a previous hard bounce or complaint.
Common causes
- The email address previously hard bounced.
- The recipient previously marked your email as spam.
- The address is on a global suppression list maintained by your ESP (e.g., Amazon SES Global Suppression List).
How to fix
- Do not attempt to send to this address. The ESP is protecting your sender reputation by blocking it.
- If you are certain the address is now valid, you may be able to manually remove it from your account-level suppression list (depending on the ESP).
Provider notes
Amazon SES. SES automatically adds hard bounces and complaints to your account-level suppression list. If you send to an address on this list, SES immediately returns a 'Permanent Suppressed' bounce without attempting delivery.
Example bounce
Permanent Suppressed: Amazon SES has suppressed sending to this address because it has a recent history of bouncing as an invalid address.
FAQ
- Why did my ESP block the send?
- ESPs block sends to known bad addresses to protect their shared IP reputation and your domain reputation.
- Can I bypass the suppression list?
- In AWS SES, you can remove an address from your account-level suppression list if you know the user has fixed their inbox. However, do this sparingly.
Written walkthrough
- Amazon SES Says Email Sent But It Never Arrived: Where It Actually Went SES returned a 200 and a message ID, but your user got nothing. Here's what "sent" really means in SES, the three places messages silently disappear, and how to trace one step by step.
- Your complaint rate is lying to you One of the most important deliverability metrics in your dashboard isn't measuring what you think it is. Your real Gmail complaint rate is probably 3–5× higher than what your ESP shows.