E-mail Delivery Events
Ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients is fundamental to your business’s operation and communication success.
Understanding email delivery status is vital for both achieving this and troubleshooting problems.
In our platform sending delivery can sometimes result in your e-mail is not delivered. On the homepage and on the document overview pages we show when there is an issue with the delivery of your e-mail.
If you see a notification with a status, which can be as following:
Dropped
Ever wonder why an email you sent never reached its intended recipient? It’s not always about deliverability; sometimes, the email isn’t even sent for delivery in the first place. This is known as an email drop, and understanding why it happens is crucial for effective email marketing and communication.
An email “drop” signifies that our system prevented your email from being sent. We provide a specific reason for the drop, helping you diagnose and address potential issues. Common reasons for dropped emails include:
- Spam Content Detected: If our integrated spam checker app is enabled, your email may be dropped if it’s identified as containing spam. This protects your sender reputation and helps maintain high deliverability rates for legitimate emails.
- Previous Unsubscription: If a recipient has previously unsubscribed from your communications, our system will automatically drop any new emails intended for them. This respects user preferences and ensures compliance with email marketing regulations.
- Invalid Recipient Email: While less common for “drops” and more for “bounces” (which happen after an attempted delivery), in some systems, an initial validation could lead to a drop if the email address format is fundamentally incorrect.
By understanding the reasons behind dropped emails, you can refine your email strategies, improve engagement, and ensure your messages reach the right inboxes. Keep an eye on your email analytics for “dropped” events and their associated reasons to optimize your outreach.
Deferred
When an email is deferred, we don’t give up. We’ll continue attempting to deliver the message for up to 72 hours. This persistence helps ensure your emails eventually reach their destination even if there are temporary network issues, recipient server problems, or full inboxes.
What Happens After 72 Hours?
If, after 72 hours of retries, the email still can’t be delivered, the deferral status changes. At this point, the deferred message turns into a block. A block signifies that the email has been permanently undeliverable after the extended retries. This information is crucial for maintaining a clean email list and optimizing your email sending strategy.
By understanding deferred emails and their lifecycle, you can better interpret your email analytics and improve your overall email deliverability.
Spam Report
For anyone sending emails, a spam complaint is a critical signal you can’t ignore. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer a valuable tool called a feedback loop (FBL). This mechanism is designed to relay specific spam complaints directly from their users back to Email Service Providers (ESPs) like us.
How Spam Events Help Your Email Reputation
When we receives a notice from an ISP’s feedback loop, we immediately trigger a spam event. This event is incredibly important for a few key reasons:
- Prompt Reaction: A spam event provides you with an instant notification that a recipient marked your email as spam. This allows you to react appropriately, whether that means adjusting your content, segmenting your audience differently, or re-evaluating your sending practices.
- Prevent Future Complaints: Perhaps most importantly, receiving a spam event means you can immediately stop sending emails to that specific address. Continuously sending to users who’ve complained about your messages significantly harms your sender reputation, leading to lower deliverability and more of your emails landing in the spam folder for all recipients.
- Maintain Sender Health: ISPs closely monitor spam complaints. High complaint rates can lead to your emails being blacklisted or throttled, severely impacting your ability to reach inboxes. By actively managing spam events, you demonstrate good sending practices and help maintain a healthy sender reputation.
In short, leveraging feedback loops and responding to spam events is essential for effective sending email. It helps you respect user preferences, keep your email lists clean, and ultimately ensure your messages reliably reach the people who want to receive them.
Bounce
Common Causes of Bounced Emails
Bounces are primarily caused by issues with the recipient’s email address. Here are some of the most frequent culprits:
- Outdated Email Addresses: People change jobs, email providers, or simply abandon old accounts. If an email address is no longer active, your message will bounce.
- Incorrectly Entered Email Addresses: A typo in an email address – a missing character, an extra dot, or the wrong domain – will lead to a bounce.
- Non-existent Email Accounts: The email address you’re sending to might simply not exist on the recipient’s server.
Why Bounce Management is Crucial for Your Email
The reality is, you often won’t know an email address is invalid until it bounces. That’s why monitoring bounce events is so important. By identifying bounced email addresses, you can:
- Check if e-mail address is valid: Regularly removing bounced addresses ensures your lists are up-to-date and accurate.
- Improve Deliverability: Sending emails to invalid addresses negatively impacts your sender reputation. A correct e-mail address signals us that you’re a responsible sender, improving the chances your legitimate emails reach the inbox.
In essence, a bounce event is a valuable notification. Use it to your advantage to maintain healthy, high-performing email lists and ensure your messages consistently reach their intended audience.