When a sending account is suspended
The account stops immediately, the campaign in flight halts wherever it was, and an appeal usually takes days without changing the outcome. The practical move is to keep appealing and to restart the sending somewhere that does not need a new domain or a new warm up.
On this page
A suspension arrives as two sentences and stops everything. This page describes what actually happens next, based on the pattern every bulk sender eventually meets, and what the realistic options are while the appeal sits in a queue.
What stops when an account is suspended?
Everything at once, including the parts you forgot were running. A sequence half your audience received stops mid flight, scheduled sends disappear, and in many cases the reporting for campaigns that already went out becomes unreachable.
The list is usually still exportable, which is the one piece of good news. Export it immediately rather than later, because access is not guaranteed to last.
Why do appeals so rarely work?
Because the decision was made by a system reading signals, and the appeal is read by a person applying the same policy. Unless the suspension was a case of mistaken identity, the reviewer is being asked to overrule a rule rather than a mistake.
Appeals also take days, sometimes weeks, and silence is the most common answer. It is still worth filing one, but it is not a plan.
Should you just open a second account there?
No. Providers treat a replacement account opened after a suspension as an attempt to get around the decision, and it usually ends faster than the first one did.
Opening with a comparable provider means starting the whole setup again: a domain, the authentication records, a verification queue and a warm up measured in weeks. That is a long way to travel to arrive back where you were on the morning of the closure.
| When | Appealing and waiting | Moving to a warm sender |
|---|---|---|
| Hour one | export the list, write the appeal | export the list, open an account |
| Hour three | queued for review | campaign sending again |
| Day two | no reply | reading replies |
| Week one | usually still nothing | second campaign out |
| Week four | starting again elsewhere | ordinary sending |
What is the fastest honest route back?
A sender that is already warm and does not need a domain of yours. There is no ramp to serve because the history belongs to the infrastructure rather than to your new account, and nothing has to be published anywhere.
That is what PhantomFox is for. No domain, no DNS record, no warm up, five minutes from account to send, and the unsubscribes and the spam reports the campaign produces land on our sending infrastructure. The page for this exact situation is alternative sending after a shutdown.
What would you change about the campaign itself?
Look at the list before the copy. Suspensions follow complaint rates, and complaint rates follow lists that never opted in.
We do not send to lists we can see were harvested, we do not supply lists, and we do not send phishing or anything built to deceive a recipient, so the same campaign that triggered a suspension for those reasons is not one to bring here. If the cause was volume or an unwarmed sender rather than the list, read what email warm up is and can you skip it and what DKIM, SPF and DMARC are for. The rest is on the answers hub.