SendGrid Account Under Review or Suspended for Bounces: A Recovery Plan

If Twilio SendGrid puts your account under review or suspends it over bounces or spam reports, stop the sending that caused it, find the list or integration responsible, keep SendGrid's suppression lists in place, verify the remaining addresses, and give the compliance team a specific account of what happened and what you changed. Then restart with your cleanest recipients.

SendGrid does not publish one fixed bounce threshold for reviews, so do not aim for a number; aim for rates that are clearly low compared with your history.

Step 1: Stop the source

Look at Activity and Statistics for the days before the notice:

Look for	What it suggests
A spike after a list import	An old, bought or unverified list
Bounces from one integration or form	A broken signup flow or bot signups
Spam reports after one campaign	Recipients did not expect it
Blocks from one mailbox provider	Reputation problem with that provider

Pause the campaign, integration or API key involved. If a form is being abused by bots, see stopping fake signups.

Step 2: Read the bounce reasons

SendGrid records a reason for each bounce and block. Group them:

• "User unknown", "mailbox does not exist": list quality.
• "Blocked", "policy", "reputation": sending reputation or authentication.
• "Mailbox full": usually old or abandoned addresses.

Paste examples into the bounce message analyzer. Hard bounce vs soft bounce explains the codes.

Step 3: Keep suppressions in place

SendGrid keeps suppression lists for bounces, invalid emails, spam reports and unsubscribes. Leave them alone. Clearing them to "give addresses another chance" sends straight back to known-bad addresses.

Also make sure your own database or CRM marks those contacts, so they are not re-imported later.

Step 4: Clean the list before sending again

List	What to do
The import that caused the spike	Verify all of it; send only valid
Older segments not mailed in months	Verify before the next send
Signup form data	Add real-time verification at the form
Contacts synced from a CRM	Verify on sync and write status back

For an application sending through SendGrid's API, checking addresses at signup prevents most future bounces; see real-time email verification on signup forms.

Step 5: Respond to SendGrid

Follow the instructions in the notice. A useful response says:

1. What caused it, in a sentence or two.
2. What you stopped, with the campaign or integration named.
3. What you changed: list verified, suppressions kept, signup validation added.
4. How you will prevent it: verification before every import, monitoring of bounce and spam rates.

Be accurate about where the contacts came from. Purchased or scraped lists are against most email providers' terms, and saying so plainly is better than being found out later.

Step 6: Restart gently

• Start with recent, engaged recipients and transactional mail if it is healthy.
• Add other segments only after they have been verified.
• Watch bounces, blocks and spam reports daily for the first weeks.

Check that authentication is right as you restart. SendGrid's domain authentication sets up DKIM and a return path; confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC with the bulk email authentication checker.

Prevent the next review

• Verify every imported list before it reaches SendGrid.
• Validate addresses on forms so bad ones never enter the list.
• Re-verify segments you have not mailed in a while.
• Remove long-term inactive contacts with a sunset policy.
• Keep spam reports low by only mailing people who expect it; see spam complaint rate explained.

Bounce rate limits by platform compares how different providers handle bounces.

Signals to monitor every week

Once sending resumes, watch these in SendGrid's statistics and in your own reporting:

Signal	What to watch for
Bounces	Any rise after an import or a new form going live
Blocks	Concentration at one mailbox provider
Spam reports	Any increase after a specific campaign
Invalid emails	New entries mean bad addresses are still getting in
Unsubscribes	A sharp rise suggests a mismatch between signup and content

Set alerts where you can, through SendGrid's event webhook and your own monitoring, so you hear about a spike within hours rather than after a review notice.

A note on dedicated IPs

Moving to a dedicated IP does not fix a list problem. A dedicated IP carries only your reputation, so bounces and complaints affect it even more directly than on a shared pool. If you are considering one, get your bounce and complaint rates under control first. Shared or dedicated IP explains when the switch makes sense.

Verify before you resume

Upload the list that caused the problem on the verify page and send only to valid addresses. You get 100 free email checks when you sign in with Google, no card. For signups, our API can check addresses before they reach SendGrid.