Troubleshooting

The most common issues, their root causes, and how to fix them.

My campaign is stuck on "Pending review"

This is by design. If you set review gates to Manual, the pipeline pauses at each gate and waits for your approval. Open the campaign detail page and click Approve to continue.

If you didn't intend to use Manual review, edit the campaign and switch to Auto. Future steps will run without prompts.

My emails aren't being sent

Check, in this order:

  1. Mailbox health — Settings → Mailboxes. Is the mailbox showing red? If yes, fix that first (warmup ramp dropped, DNS broken, or password expired).
  2. Send window — campaign config → Schedule. Is the current time inside the window?
  3. Daily cap — has the mailbox already hit its 50/day cap? Caps reset at midnight UTC.
  4. Per-domain hourly cap — if your campaign targets a single domain heavily (e.g., 200 leads at @acme.com), the per-domain hourly limit (30/hr) throttles sends.
  5. Account paused — bounces over 5% auto-pause the campaign. The dashboard will show a warning banner.

Bounces are spiking

3-5% is yellow zone; over 5% auto-pauses the campaign.

Check:

  1. Lead source quality — fresh, verified leads should bounce <2%. Spike usually means stale source.
  2. Verification provider — Settings → Mailboxes → Verification. Is your primary provider (MillionVerifier) returning errors? The cascade falls back to ZeroBounce / NeverBounce automatically, but if all 3 fail you're sending unverified.
  3. Domain reputation — a sudden bounce-rate climb at one specific recipient domain (e.g., outlook.com) suggests they've started rejecting your sends. Check Settings → Domains.

Reply classification is mislabeling things

The Haiku classifier is ~94% accurate but not perfect. To correct a label:

  1. Open the reply in Inbox
  2. Click the label badge → Reclassify
  3. Pick the correct label

Corrections are remembered for that thread and used to refine the model over time.

My ICP changes aren't taking effect on a running campaign

This is by design (Council Decision 5). Each campaign holds a frozen snapshot of the ICP at launch. Workspace ICP edits take effect only on campaigns launched after the edit.

If you need to apply a new ICP to a running campaign, you must launch a new campaign with the updated ICP.

I can't connect a mailbox

Common causes:

  1. App password not used — Google + Microsoft require app-specific passwords for IMAP/SMTP, not your regular password
  2. 2FA blocking — sometimes 2FA + app password setup fails; check the provider's security settings
  3. OAuth scope denied — the connect dialog needs full IMAP read + SMTP send scopes
  4. DNS not yet propagated — if you just set up SPF/DKIM, wait 30 minutes and retry

My DNS records show "missing" but I added them

DNS propagation can take 15 minutes to 4 hours. The Defrost DNS checker uses Google's public resolver (8.8.8.8) which usually has fresh records within 30 minutes.

If 4 hours have passed:

  1. Verify with dig or nslookup from your terminal
  2. Check that the record is at the exact name Defrost requested (e.g., defrost._domainkey not _domainkey)
  3. Some providers wrap the record value in extra quotes that break parsers — strip them

Defrost Track shows zero clicks even though leads are clicking

Most likely:

  1. Tracking subdomain DNS missing — t.defrost.app (or your custom subdomain) needs a CNAME to cname.vercel-dns.com
  2. Browser blocks third-party redirects — some leads use mailbox providers that strip tracker URLs (Outlook Safe Links, Gmail's link wrapper). These show as direct clicks rather than tracked clicks.

Still stuck?

Contact support at help@defrostmail.com with your workspace name and a description of what you tried.

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