Vitally Email Service Best Practices

This guide covers how to avoid a Vitally Email Service sending suspension, and what to do if one happens. For setup, aliases, and sending, see the Vitally Email Service article.

Why Vitally Email Service Has Sending Limits

The Vitally Email Service sends on shared infrastructure. If one account's bounce rate climbs too high, it can affect deliverability for other Vitally customers, not just that account. To prevent that, Vitally automatically pauses sending for an account whose bounce rate or bounce volume crosses a threshold. See Bounce Rate Management & Sending Suspension for the specific thresholds. This protects your deliverability and everyone else's.

Hard-bounced addresses (ones that don't exist) are automatically flagged and blocked from future sends the moment they bounce. Since Vitally already prevents repeat sends to those addresses, repeat suspensions are usually caused by new addresses going bad, not resending to old ones.

Best Practices to Avoid a Suspension

Keep your contact lists clean. Regularly remove stale or invalid addresses, for example by filtering out contacts who haven't logged into your product recently.
Don't use Vitally Email Service as a list-validation tool. If you have a large or legacy list, validate it first with a dedicated service (e.g., ZeroBounce, NeverBounce) rather than finding out which addresses are dead by sending to them.
Segment your sends. Send higher volumes to trusted, engaged users and keep unverified or lower-confidence lists smaller. This keeps your overall bounce rate down even if a subset of addresses is riskier.
Send regularly to your known-good, engaged addresses. Since the pause threshold is a percentage, a higher total volume of healthy sends means it takes more bounces to trip the threshold.
Monitor proactively. A Conversations view filtered by bounced vs. not bounced will catch a rising bounce rate before it becomes a suspension.
Reach out to Support at least a week before a planned large send so we can help you plan around your sending limits.
Send high-volume email from a dedicated subdomain. Using a subdomain such as news.yourcompany.com keeps the sending reputation of your bulk email separate from your primary domain, so a bad list does not put your everyday business email at risk.

💡 Tip: As a general email best practice (not specific to Vitally Email Service), sending from a no-reply@ address tends to have worse deliverability than a monitored address. It isn't a hard bounce risk on its own, but list quality is almost always the bigger factor in deliverability.

If You've Been Suspended: Getting Reinstated

A suspension lasts 7 days, and sending resumes automatically when it ends. If you've fixed the cause of the bounces, for example by cleaning your contact list, contact your CSM or Support to ask about an override.

What Happens to Messages That Failed During a Suspension

Messages that fail to send while you're paused are retried automatically every hour for up to 7 days. Any message still unsent after 7 days is marked as permanently not sent, and you need to resend it manually.

Quick Reference

A suspension lasts 7 days, and sending resumes automatically when it ends.
Failed messages are retried hourly for up to 7 days, then need to be resent manually.
Hard bounces are the highest-risk signal since they're permanently blocked from future sends automatically.
Talk to Support at least a week before any unusually large send.