TL;DR
- The auto-pause triggers above 5% bounces, once at least 200 emails have been sent. It's on by default.
- Don't just resume. A resumed campaign won't auto-pause again for 7 days, so a bad list can keep bouncing.
- Pull the unsent leads, verify them, remove the bad ones, then resume.
How Instantly's auto-pause works
According to Instantly's help center, High Bounce Auto-Pause is on by default. It pauses a campaign when the bounce rate passes 5%, and only checks once at least 200 emails have gone out. You can change the threshold or turn it off. After you resume, the campaign won't auto-pause again for 7 days.
Instantly's own guidance is to keep hard bounces at 2% or lower. The 5% pause is the emergency brake, not the target.
What to do right now
- Leave it paused. Every extra bounce lands on the same sending domains.
- Check where the bounces came from. Was it one lead source, one step of the sequence, or one sending domain?
- Export the campaign's leads that haven't been contacted yet.
- Verify them in MailExchange. Remove undeliverable leads, and move catch-alls into their own campaign.
- Re-import the clean leads and resume, ideally at a lower daily volume for a few days.
Why it happened
- An unverified or stale lead source. Databases decay as people change jobs. "Verified" in a lead tool means verified at some point in the past.
- Catch-all leads. These domains accept everything at first and bounce later. In Hunter's test, catch-alls bounced 27% of the time versus 1% for valid addresses.
- Long sequences. Bounces can rise in later steps as the list ages, so re-verify lists that sit in a sequence for weeks.
Stop it happening again
Verify every list before import, not after a pause. See how to verify leads for Instantly, and how many bounces it takes to burn a domain.