Postmark suspends addresses, not accounts, on bounce or complaint

The workload

Postmark's own bounce-handling guide describes two distinct problems a sender must monitor: hard bounces (permanently undeliverable addresses) and spam complaints. Verified: the guide states that Postmark automatically suspends further delivery to any address that produces a hard bounce or a spam complaint, without a founder needing to build that suppression logic. Verified: a hard bounce can be manually reactivated by the sender through the API or web interface, but the linked spam-complaint article states that an address suppressed for a spam complaint can only be reactivated by emailing Postmark support and explaining what happened — a step the founder cannot self-serve.

What the documents show

Verified: the bounce-handling guide states that, across a range of accounts on Postmark's own platform, addressing hard bounces alone resolves roughly 80% of bounce-related delivery issues, a figure the guide describes as a general ballpark rather than a guarantee for any specific account. Verified: the spam-complaints article states that a complaint typically means the recipient no longer wants email from that sender, and that the address is automatically added to a suppression list once a complaint is received. Neither document states a numeric bounce-rate or complaint-rate percentage that would suspend an entire sending account; the suspension mechanism described operates per recipient address, not as an account-wide threshold, and this entry does not assert one that the documents do not contain.

The operating cost

The documents describe a recurring task rather than a fee: monitoring bounce and complaint notifications and deciding, address by address, whether to fix a typo, wait for a soft bounce to clear, or accept that the recipient is gone. The guide states this does not need a 'robust' automated solution on day one but recommends building up handling capability over time as volume grows, without naming a specific hours-per-week figure.

The stop condition

The documents supply a partial stop condition at the per-address level: a hard-bounced or complained-about address stops receiving mail until the founder or the recipient acts. At the account level, the documents are silent on a bounce-rate ceiling; editorially, since the guide attributes 80% of bounce issues to hard bounces, a reasonable review point is whenever hard-bounce notifications are arriving faster than they are being triaged, since that is the condition the guide's own 80% figure implies is worth acting on first.

• Is there a routine for checking hard-bounce notifications, or do they only get noticed when a customer complains separately?
• Would a spam complaint on a real customer's address require emailing Postmark support to reactivate it, and is that process known?
• Does actual bounce volume suggest the 80% figure from Postmark's own accounts applies here, or is this account's mix different?

The documents describe a per-address suppression mechanism and a rough proportion, not a fixed account-level threshold, so the workload they name is ongoing monitoring rather than a one-time compliance check.