How can I get notified when an email address is blacklisted or experiences a bounce?

Pushwoosh gives you three ways to see and react to email bounces:

1. bouncedEmails API method:

   • Call POST https://api.pushwoosh.com/api/v2/statistics/emails/bouncedEmails to retrieve bounce records for a time period.
   • The response contains total and a bounced_emails array; each record has email, date (ISO 8601), reason, and type — Hardbounce, Softbounce, or Complaint.
   • Poll it on a schedule (for example daily) to monitor bounces proactively.
   • API documentation: Message Statistics API – bouncedEmails

2. Bounced Email Date default tag (segmentation):

   • When a hard bounce occurs, Pushwoosh writes the date of that bounce to the server-side default tag Bounced Email Date (type: Date).
   • Because it is stored as a Date, you can build segments on it — for example, exclude everyone with a bounce in the last N days from a campaign.
   • Tag reference: Tags

3. Automatic list hygiene:

   • Hard-bounced addresses are removed from your mailing list automatically and are blocked from being re-registered, so you do not need to blacklist them yourself.
   • See Email deliverability.

Understanding bounces

• Hard bounce — permanent delivery failure (for example, the address does not exist). Pushwoosh stops sending to that address.
• Soft bounce — temporary issue (mailbox full, server unavailable). The address is not removed, but repeated soft bounces indicate a deliverability problem.
• Complaint — the recipient reported the message as spam. These are also returned by bouncedEmails.

Want a push/webhook the moment a bounce happens? There is no PW_EmailBounced default event — the email default events are PW_EmailSent, PW_EmailOpen, PW_EmailLinkClicked and PW_EmailUnsubscribed. Use the bouncedEmails API on a schedule, or contact Pushwoosh support to discuss a bounce webhook for your account.