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Email Health & Bounce Protection

An email address that bounces is worse than a missing one: every send looks successful, while the customer never sees an invoice, quote or appointment reminder. CleverOps treats a permanent rejection as a hard signal:

  • The first permanent bounce (or a recipient reporting an email as spam) pauses all automated emails to that address.
  • A task is filed in Tasks Due ("Email bouncing: …") linked to the customer, so someone owns the fix.
  • The pause lifts when you update the address on the customer, or mark it fixed after repairing the mailbox.

Not every bounce means a bad address​

Email providers report two very different things under the same word.

  • A permanent bounce means the mailbox does not exist. The address is dead, and this is what pauses sending.
  • A transient bounce means the receiving server was busy or deferring. The provider retries for hours and eventually reports that it gave up on that attempt. The address is usually perfectly good — the next send often lands.

Only permanent bounces pause an address. A transient one is recorded against the message (you'll see Delayed rather than Bounced on the send) and nothing is withheld. If a provider sends a bounce it cannot classify, CleverOps treats it as transient: silently withholding a customer's invoices is the more expensive mistake.

Which address gets blamed​

One email to three recipients is a single message at the provider, so a bounce can arrive without saying which of the three failed. CleverOps only pauses the address the provider names, or — on a single-recipient email — the one address it could have been.

When a permanent bounce arrives on a multi-recipient email and the provider names nobody, no address is paused. Instead a task is filed ("Email bounced, recipient unknown") listing the recipients, so a person decides which one to pull. Guessing here would pause working addresses that merely happened to share an email with a broken one.

What pauses — and what doesn't​

Paused (automated senders): overdue-invoice and quote reminders, pre-debit notices, job appointment reminders, signature reminders, onboarding journey messages, and the Monthly Smart Summary.

Not paused: anything a staff member sends by hand from a send dialog. Those dialogs already show the red email is bouncing warning above the To field — you keep the power to send anyway.

SMS, WhatsApp and app push are never affected. Where a reminder has an SMS leg (invoice reminders, job reminders), the SMS still goes out while the email leg is withheld.

The Email health panel​

Video Email health · 0:28

Open Billing → Config → Automation → Email health.

The paused addresses table shows each address with its customer, bounce count, when it was paused, and how many automated sends have been withheld since. Where the email provider reported a reason, it shows under the address — so you can tell a full mailbox (fix the mailbox) from no such user (fix the address) at a glance. From here you can:

  1. Open the customer to update the address — a new address was never paused, so sending resumes automatically; or
  2. Fix the mailbox itself (full inbox, expired domain) and click Mark fixed — optionally with a note. Automated emails resume on the next sweep and the Tasks Due task closes itself.

A Previously fixed section keeps the history. If a fixed address bounces again later, it re-pauses automatically and the task is re-filed.

Reminders that were paused don't get lost

A reminder whose email was withheld (and that had no SMS leg to carry it) stays due — it sends on the very next sweep after the address is fixed, not a full cadence later.

On the customer record​

The customer page (and every send dialog) shows the bounce warning with the paused state spelled out, so you see "automated emails are on hold" at the moment you'd otherwise wonder why the customer never replies.

The warning distinguishes two situations, because they call for different responses:

  • "Email isn't reaching this customer" — nothing has arrived at that address at all. Phone the customer for a working one.
  • "Email to this customer is bouncing" — some sends are being rejected but others are still landing, and the panel shows when the last one did. Worth checking, not urgent.

An address that occasionally gets delayed but still delivers is not shown at all. Warning about mail that arrived teaches everyone to ignore the panel.