About Suspension

If sending is disabled in your account or you've received a suspension notice, we know you're ready to resolve the issue and get back to work.

In this article, you'll learn about suspensions, why they occur, and how to fix them.

What is suspension?

Suspension occurs when Mailchimp disables certain features on your account, which can include sending and import capabilities, while you're under review with our Compliance team. Your account is still active, so signup forms, API requests, and other features will continue to work.

In rare cases, we may completely suspend an account, which includes logins, API requests, and tracking.

Why did this happen?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and anti-spam organizations keep a close eye on Mailchimp as a sender. If they see a high rate of negative response to an email or a particular sender, they can block any Mailchimp email from reaching anyone on their ISP.

To protect the sending reputation of all Mailchimp users, our automated abuse-prevention system and our Compliance team review negative email or audience import results, and sometimes have to issue a suspension until we can identify what's going on. Most of the time, we'll issue a warning before we suspend an account.

Here are some of the reasons we issue a suspension.

• Terms of use violation
• High abuse rate
  When a recipient marks one of your emails as spam, it registers as an abuse complaint in your Mailchimp account. If abuse complaints exceed our threshold, we’ll send you a warning notice. If the abuse rate is far beyond that threshold, we’ll send you a suspension notice and begin to investigate your sending and audience collection practices.
• High rate of hard bounces
  Hard bounces are emails that can't be delivered because the email address no longer exists.
• Your email domain isn't authenticated
  Beginning February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will require a custom authentication and a published Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record for anyone sending more than 5,000 emails to Gmail or Yahoo addresses in a 24-hour period. To prevent your emails from bouncing, we strongly recommend authenticating your email domain and configuring DMARC.
• High unsubscribe rates
  When someone clicks the unsubscribe link in your email, they're automatically opted out of email marketing. Mailchimp scans for high unsubscribe rates because they can hurt your reputation and deliverability.
• Direct complaints
  This is when a contact receives unwanted email and notifies us, anti-spam organizations, or a hosting facility. These types of complaints can result in denylisting (other providers may refer to it as "blacklisting") of sending domains or IPs.

What should I do next?

Log in to Mailchimp and navigate to your Account page. There, you'll find information about why your account was disabled. Messages from Compliance are also available on your Account page under the Account History heading.

We’ll also send an email to the primary account contact on file with details about the issue and instructions on how to move forward.

We review accounts during business hours (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm, EST).

Avoid future issues

To avoid suspension in the future, we recommend you focus on healthy audience management practices. Here are some articles to help you identify what may need to improve.

Requirements and Best Practices for Audiences
Anti-Spam Requirements for Email