As an administrator, you can help troubleshoot an email that bounces with an error message that doesn’t help fix the problem.
Depending on your account settings or content of the message, there are a number of possible reasons why the message bounced. For example, the message was possibly marked as spam by the outbound spam filter. Or, inbound gateway restrictions might have caused the recipient's servers to reject the message. We have safeguards to keep spammers from signing up for Google Workspace and sending spam.
If your organization's Google Workspace account is mistakenly disabled for spamming, you need to reset your account. For details, contact Google Workspace support.
Recommended solutions
Applies if you’re sending a message to a large group
If you’re sending a message to a large number of recipients, our system might flag the message as spam. The most common issue is that a message is Cc’d or Bcc’d to a large number of recipients, similar to how spam is sent out. To fix this, put all your recipients in a group and send the message to the group address instead. Visit Set up Groups for your team
Important: If a message can't be delivered to a large number of the group's members, the group message will bounce. Be sure to only include active, correctly spelled email addresses.
If third parties can’t receive your messages
Third-party blacklists can cause other domains to reject your organization's messages. The recipient's settings could be configured to reject messages that aren’t sent from specific IP addresses or servers, preventing a message from going through. To solve the problem, contact the recipient's domain or IT administrator and ask them to configure their settings to accept your mail.
If you or your users are using a POP/IMAP client, you need to sign out and then back in to your account using Gmail, rather than another email client.
Applies to mail sent within your organization
In your Admin console, if you set up an inbound gateway to only accept mail from the specified hosts, you might have problems receiving mail. Specifically, if you select Reject all mail not from gateway IPs, you can only receive mail from those hosts. Your MX records will need to direct mail to the correct destination. Any messages delivered to Gmail from any other hosts will be rejected. Learn more about inbound gateways.
