Deliverability, bounces and unsubscribes

Your Emails page shows a deliverability reading based on your last 30 days of sending. It has four states, and they are worth learning before you need them.

• Good standing. Healthy. Keep emailing people who asked to hear from you.

• Watch closely. Creeping up. Clean inactive addresses before your next send.

• At the limit. One more bad send and this stops.

• Over the line. Sending is paused to protect your domain.

The two numbers

A hard bounce is an address that does not exist. Too many means your list is stale or imported. A bounced address is suppressed for all mail, including sign-in codes, because there is nothing at the other end.

A spam complaint is somebody pressing the report button. That address stops receiving your broadcasts for good, but account email still reaches them, so they can still sign in and manage what they pay you.

What the reading counts

It counts the bulk email your community sends: broadcasts, automations, new-content emails, the community digest, and posts you email to members. Receipts, booking and event confirmations and other account email are left out. A bounce or complaint on one of those still stops that address getting mail, but it does not move your reading and cannot trigger a pause.

When sending is paused

Two things pause your bulk email, and each needs a real amount of mail behind it, so one bad address on a small send cannot trip it:

• Spam complaints at about 3 in every 1,000 emails over the last 30 days, once you have sent at least 100.

• Hard bounces at 4% over the last 30 days, once you have sent at least 50. At 2% nothing is paused yet, but you are emailed a warning so you can clean the list first.

While you are paused, broadcasts, automations, the digest, event announcements, form and landing page autoresponders, and emailing a post to members all stop. A new-content email waits and goes out once the pause is lifted. Sign-in codes, receipts and other account email keep working. You are emailed when it happens, and a person at Drry lifts the pause after a review.

What actually fixes it

• Stop emailing people who have not opened anything in six months. They are not going to start.

• Make the unsubscribe link easy to find. Somebody who cannot find it presses report instead.

• Send on a rhythm people can predict, and say what the rhythm is when they join.

• Never import a list you did not collect.