List Hygiene

Plunk automatically monitors the bounce and complaint rates of your emails to help maintain a health sender reputation. High bounce or complaint rates can negatively impact your deliverability and may lead to your account being suspended.

Bounce Management

A bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered to the recipient's inbox. Plunk records every bounce as an email.bounce event on the contact, and automatically unsubscribes the contact only on permanent (hard) bounces. Transient (soft) bounces don't change subscription state — they're typically retried by the upstream mail server.

Types of Bounces

Both bounce types fire an email.bounce event you can branch on inside workflows or webhooks (use the event payload's bounceType field to distinguish them).

Preventing bounces

• Verify email addresses at signup before adding them to your list.
• Regularly clean your email list — segment unengaged contacts and re-confirm or remove them.
• Build a confirmation flow with a workflow that sends a verification email and only marks the contact as confirmed when they click through.

Complaint Management

A complaint occurs when a recipient marks your email as spam in their inbox provider. When Plunk receives that complaint, the contact is always automatically unsubscribed and Plunk fires an email.complaint event on the contact.

Complaints are taken more seriously than bounces by mail providers — even a small complaint rate can hurt your sender reputation and deliverability.

Preventing complaints

• Ensure your emails are relevant and valuable to your audience.
• Include a clear, working unsubscribe link in every marketing email — Plunk injects this automatically for MARKETING template/campaign types.
• Monitor your email frequency to avoid overwhelming your contacts.
• Make sure recipients clearly opted in. Avoid scraped, purchased, or stale lists.