When you send a mailing from your account, the response tracking that begins is actually happening at two distinct levels: the server where your recipient’s inbox is hosted and managed, and the inbox itself.
On the Response page, you can view the following types of mailings: In progress, Active autoresponders, and Completed. To access this, you would navigate to your Response page and then you can select to view the response summary of any of your sent campaigns by clicking the down-facing arrow to the right of the campaign’s row and selecting View response.
What info is tracked by receiving servers?
Emails sent, received, in progress, and bounced all happen at the server level when we receive certain codes (and messages to go with them) back from the receiving servers. Beyond that initial level of tracking, the receiving servers control much of what happens from there. They decide whether to deliver emails immediately to recipients or to run them through a filtering program of some sort. And, like any server network, they occasionally experience problems like too much traffic, viruses, or overflowing inboxes. Here’s a breakdown of the important information that gets delivered to your account.
Emails sent
Quite literally, this is the number of emails that attempted to send on your behalf. Each campaign you send takes just a few minutes to prepare before heading out the virtual door. During this brief window of time (often just a few seconds), your mailing will display as building on the “In progress” tab of the Response page. If you’ve waited a few minutes and still don’t see your mailing listed under the “In progress” section, it may not have gone out.
For example: If you selected a group of 1,000 people to send your mailing to, then your sent total should eventually be 1,000. Remember that we’re only going to attempt to reach the Active members of an audience group, not members in Error or Opt-out status, and that your totals for sent, received, and bounced may take up to 30 hours to fully tabulate. That’s because we’re continuing to try to reach email address over a period of hours, should the first several attempts fail. Once your mailing has completed, the response will display on the Completed tab of the Response page.
Emails delivered
Emails delivered is the number of emails that were successfully delivered to servers on the other end. When an email is delivered, the server that receives it provides us with a response code. The codes tell us if the email was successfully accepted, rejected because of a network or inbox problem, or bounced back because the email was deemed unfamiliar or unwanted. There is a standard set of response codes, and most servers are good about using those codes in the right way. At that point, we’re relying on the server to finish the delivery job and pass the email on to its intended recipient.
For that reason, it’s entirely possible for an email to be received by the server but never reach a recipient’s inbox. Because many servers and networks incorporate filters to help decide which emails get delivered and which do not, it’s important to closely monitor things like bounces and other response metrics and to make sure you’re adhering to our very high standards of permission-based email marketing.
Emails in progress
Emails in progress represent the number of emails currently in line to be sent or retried. You may see emails in progress for up to 30 hours, as we make follow-up delivery attempts every 30 minutes to addresses whose servers may have been busy, down, or unresponsive on our first try.
Bounced emails
Before an email can reach someone’s inbox, it has to be accepted by the host server. So, a bounced status represents emails that were kicked back as undeliverable by the receiving server. Bounces occur when the SMTP transaction between our mail server and your recipient’s mail server fails. The error codes given at the time of the bounce might be standardized at each organization, but they can be quite different from provider to provider.
There are two main categories for bounces:
1. Soft bounce (a three-digit response code starting with a 4)
A soft bounce is a temporary failure due to an outage, full mailbox, or another issue that should resolve itself. Soft bounces are considered temporary, so delivery is reattempted over a 30-hour period before giving up on reaching the receiving server. Any email addresses still bouncing after four attempts will be marked as a soft bounce, and your campaign’s delivery will be complete. Additionally, any address that soft bounces will remain an Active contact in your audience unless it soft bounces three consecutive times, at which point it will be moved to Error status and not included in future sends.
2. Hard bounce (a three-digit response code starting with a 5)
A hard bounce represents a permanent obstruction to email delivery, such as a nonexistent email address, a block due to content, or the server is rejecting your email as junk mail or spam. Hard bounces are deemed invalid and moved to Error status. These email addresses won’t be sent to again unless you re-activate them.
If you feel an email address is inaccurately displayed as an Error, or notice a delivery problem with an ISP, it’s a good idea to first investigate the Error status of any recipient or group and attempt to restore those addresses, and you will most likely need to work directly with ISPs and blacklists to resolve your sending issues quickly.
Error code links by company
For reference, we’ve compiled a list of error code help documentation by ISP / company. Please note that we don’t manage or monitor these sites, but they can be helpful if you’re trying to track down the reason for a bounce.