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Why was I throttled or paused?

If your sends are suddenly going out slower than usual, or being refused entirely, Bird's protective limits have likely kicked in. This isn't a punishment — it's a circuit breaker. This page explains what trips it, what you'll see, and how to get back to normal.

Why Bird slows or pauses sending

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo judge senders by their track record. Mail that bounces, gets reported as spam, or drives a wave of unsubscribes damages that track record — and once a provider starts distrusting your domain, everything you send lands in spam or gets blocked, including the mail your recipients actually want.
Reputation damage is much easier to prevent than to repair. So when Bird sees sustained harmful signals from your sending, it intervenes before mailbox providers do: first by throttling (slowing your sending rate), and if the signals are bad enough, by pausing sending entirely.
The signals that drive this are the same ones you can watch yourself:
  • Bounce rate — the share of your sends going to addresses that don't exist. As guidance, a hard-bounce rate approaching roughly 5% is the ballpark where sending gets paused. Healthy lists run far below 1%, and mailbox providers start degrading your inbox placement well before 5%.
  • Complaint rate — the share of delivered mail recipients report as spam. This needs to stay under 0.3% — that's the hard ceiling Gmail and Yahoo enforce for bulk senders, and sustained rates above about 0.1% already hurt placement.
  • Unsubscribe spikes — unsubscribes are normal, but a sudden surge on a campaign is an early warning that you're mailing people who didn't expect it. Recipients who can't easily unsubscribe report spam instead.
These thresholds are guidance, not hard cutoffs — enforcement weighs your volume, history, and trend, so two bounces in a ten-message test are treated very differently from the same rate across a million-recipient campaign. The developer-facing detail is on the abuse & compliance page.

What you'll see

  • Throttled: your sends are accepted but go out more slowly than usual. Nothing fails — delivery just takes longer while your rates recover.
  • Paused: new sends are refused with a clear error explaining that sending is paused.
  • In both cases, a notice in the dashboard tells you what state your sending is in and which signal triggered it.
A pause stops the damage from getting worse — every additional send to a bad list digs the hole deeper, so the refusal is protecting the recovery you're about to do.

The path back to full speed

The throttle responds to your signals, so recovery means fixing the source of the signals — not just waiting it out. Work through these in order:
  1. Stop sending to the addresses that caused it. Hard-bounced and complaining addresses are already on your suppression list automatically, but if the campaign that triggered the pause is still queued or scheduled elsewhere, stop it.
  2. Clean your list. Remove addresses that have bounced, haven't engaged in months, or were never properly opted in. If the list was purchased, scraped, or imported from an old system, this is almost certainly the root cause — the list hygiene guide walks through the cleanup.
  3. Check your authentication. Make sure your sending domain is verified and its DKIM and DMARC records are in place — unauthenticated mail is far more likely to be filtered and reported.
  4. Let your rates recover, then ramp gradually. Once you resume, don't jump straight back to full volume. Start with your most engaged recipients and increase volume steadily, the same way you'd warm up a new domain — the warming guide covers the ramp.
Resuming with the same list that caused the pause will reproduce the same signals and the same pause — fix the list first, always.

Staying out of trouble

The best version of this page is the one you never need again. Watch your own bounce and complaint rates per campaign — they're visible in your sending metrics, and they're exactly what Bird's protective limits watch. The reputation monitoring guide shows what to track and what healthy numbers look like.

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