What a bounce means
When you email an invoice, quote, statement, payslip or project document, Beeswax sends it through our email provider (Postmark). Sometimes the recipient's mail server refuses the message:
- Hard bounce — the address doesn't exist (a typo, a person who left the company, a closed mailbox). The address is permanently undeliverable.
- Spam complaint — the recipient marked your email as spam. Their provider has asked us not to email them again.
- Soft bounce — a temporary problem (full mailbox, server outage). These usually resolve themselves and don't suppress the address.
After a hard bounce or spam complaint, the address is suppressed: our email provider will refuse any further mail to it, so Beeswax stops attempting to send there and warns you instead.
How Beeswax tells you
- Email notification — the person who clicked Send receives an email explaining which address bounced and why. If they can't be reached, the account's Super Admins are notified instead.
- Contact alert — when a bouncing address matches one of your contacts, your Super Admins receive a "Contact email is bouncing" email (at most once per day per address).
- Activity drawer — bounces and spam complaints appear in the activity feed and on the document's own activity timeline, marked "Email Bounced".
- Send screens — when you open a send window, addresses that are known to bounce are highlighted in red with a warning banner, and documents whose most recent send bounced show a red alert.
- Contacts — bouncing contacts show an "Email bouncing" badge in the company's people list and on the contact's edit form.
What happens when you send to a suppressed address
Beeswax sends to the working addresses and skips the suppressed ones — the skipped addresses are recorded in the document's activity and the sender is told. If every address on the email is suppressed, the send is blocked with a clear message so you can fix the address first.
Fixing a bouncing contact
- Confirm the correct address with your contact (by phone or another channel).
- Open Contacts, edit the person, and update their email address.
- Resend the document — the new address is checked independently, so the send goes through.
If the same address later becomes valid again (for example, the mailbox was restored), reactivating it requires removing the suppression in the Postmark dashboard — contact Beeswax support and we'll do this for you. Simply retrying from Beeswax will not un-suppress an address.
For spam complaints
Please stop emailing that recipient. Their provider has recorded that they don't want these emails, and continuing to send damages your sending reputation. If the complaint was a mistake, ask the recipient to contact you and whitelist your emails first.