How to decide whether to continue transactional emails?

Your marketing emails hit deliverability trouble. Now you're wondering: should you keep sending transactional emails, or shut them down too? It's a harder call than it seems, because transactional mail is high-stakes. A lost password reset or order confirmation means a customer can't complete their task. That's different from a marketing email.

Here's the core decision: Can you keep transactional mail separate from your marketing reputation problem? If yes, you should keep sending. If no, you need to at least consider pausing or rerouting.

Check your infrastructure first. Are transactional and marketing emails sharing an IP address or subdomain? If they're completely isolated (separate IP, separate domain), they have their own reputation bucket. Your marketing trouble won't touch them. That's the ideal setup. If they share infrastructure, they share reputation too, and your marketing problem will drag transactional deliverability down with it.

Next, look at your transactional metrics right now. Pull bounce rates, complaint rates, and acceptance rates. If transactional metrics are healthy and separate from your marketing problem, keep going. If they're already declining, the marketing issue is already contaminating transactional mail. That means you need to act.

Here are your options. Option one: Make sure authentication (DKIM, SPF, DMARC) is set up correctly on a separate transactional subdomain. This isolates reputation. Option two: Throttle marketing volume hard while you recover. That removes the pressure on the shared infrastructure. Option three: Move transactional to a backup sending path or third-party provider temporarily. It's not ideal, but it keeps critical emails reaching customers.

Don't just stop sending transactional mail unless you absolutely have to. Your customers need receipts, password resets, and order confirmations. Instead, protect them by isolating infrastructure where possible, or pair that with a marketing pause to ease pressure on shared systems.

Your next move: Check whether your transactional and marketing streams are on separate infrastructure. If yes, keep transactional going and focus recovery effort on marketing. If no, consider either isolating transactional to a new subdomain or temporarily moving it to a backup provider until marketing reputation recovers.