📩 Stop Blocking My Emails!

It happened again.

I was zipping through a packing list for a flight to Austin for the Newsletter Marketing Summit when one of my newsletters lit up with an abnormal bounce alert. Snap back to the day after Christmas. Same kind of notice. Same punch-in-the-gut feeling for most senders.

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My list had gone from clean delivery to thousands of soft bounces overnight.

Deep breath. No drama. I walked to my home office, sat in the wingback leather chair, and opened my ESP along with my custom Audience Bridge deliverability dashboard. The job: figure out which addresses were bouncing and why.

Some ESPs bury the trail. Mine didn’t. The dashboard pointed to Yahoo Postmaster as the source of the trouble, which covers Yahoo and AOL.

Then the key detail: the bounce code was a standard TSS04 response from Yahoo Postmaster. In plain English, you can trigger that when volume jumps too fast or when complaint rates tick up. It’s Yahoo’s way of saying slow down, clean up, and try again.

So that’s what I did.

What I tightened

I narrowed sending to only the most engaged subscribers at Yahoo and AOL. Concretely, I excluded anyone at those domains who hadn’t clicked in the last 14 days. No exceptions, no “but this segment is special” thinking.

I sent that way for about a week. I watched the trend line, not a single send. Once delivery started flowing normally again, I loosened the exclude filters in steps, letting more Yahoo and AOL subscribers back in. About a week and a half later, I was back at full send.

What this means for you

Blocks happen as you scale. They’re fixable. The two levers you control every day are engagement and list health. If you hit a wall, keep it boring and methodical.

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A quick checklist you can copy:

• Confirm scope fast: which domains, which campaigns, which segments.

• Read the exact error text, not just the summary in your ESP.

• Tighten sending to recent engagers at the affected domains, for a defined period.

• Monitor daily trends, not single-send noise.

• Re-open segments gradually, in steps, until you reach normal volume.

A few practical notes from this round: TSS04 wants to see steady behavior. Sudden leaps in volume, even for good reasons, can trip it. So can rising complaints from stale segments that haven’t clicked in weeks. When in doubt, prune or pause. Your future inbox placement is worth the short-term restraint.

Next time you see bounce counts spike, do what I do. Breathe. Identify the source. Tighten the list. Send smaller for a bit, then scale up in stages. Simple process, strong outcomes.

You’ll be fine.

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