FAQs: Email deliverability

How often should I send emails?

In general, we recommend sending one or two emails per week.

That said, one of the key factors in your email sending reputation is how your subscribers engage with the emails you send them. The more of your subscribers engage with your email, the better. Use the following guidelines to determine how often you should email your subscribers based on how recently they engaged with your email content:

• 0-29 days since last engagement: High send frequency. You can freely send relevant emails to these highly engaged subscribers.
• 30-59 days since last engagement: Medium send frequency, no more than twice per week.
• 60-89 days since last engagement: Low send frequency, no more than once per week.
• More than 90 days since last engagement: Only send emails as part of a winback journey to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in more than three months.
• More than 180 days: You should not email these subscribers at all.

As a best practice, you can create segments based on engagement like opens and clicks to ensure that you’re messaging subscribers at the right cadence.

How can I improve my email deliverability rates?

Many factors go into your brand's deliverability rating For a deep dive into email deliverability, check out Email deliverability overview.

You can improve your email deliverability by optimizing your email messages for:

• Opens
• Adding you to a safe sender list
• Forwarding email messages from you
• Replying to email messages from you
• Moving email messages you sent to a folder or starring it
• Marking emails you send as "Not Spam"

You can also improve your email deliverability by optimizing against:

• Being reported as spam
• Sending emails to lapsed and unengaged subscribers (see: What’s a spam trap?).
• Not being opened
• Moving your emails to the junk folder
• What are good engagement metrics? 

See Email deliverability overview for more information.

What is sender reputation?

Sender reputation is your reputation as an email sender. It’s used to determine whether emails you send should be blocked or go to junk/spam folders instead of inboxes. Your reputation is based on the quality of your email campaigns.

Many elements make up sender reputation, and every mailbox provider scores reputation differently. Unfortunately, there’s no single metric to measure reputation. Most mailbox providers use IP addresses and sending domains to track reputation. They typically consider many of the following factors:

• Number of emails sent
• Frequency of emails sent
• How many subscribers mark emails as spam
• Whether emails are hitting spam traps
• Whether the domain or IP address is on a blocklist
• How many emails bounce
• How many recipients open, reply to, forward, or delete emails
• How many recipients click links in emails
• How many recipients unsubscribe from emails
• Results of DNS checks

Most mailbox providers also consider the following:

• Sending IP address
• "From" domain
• Domain authentication alignment ("From" domain, SPF, DKIM, rDNS, DMARC)
• Domains used for click tracking and content hosting

Each mailbox provider considers and prioritizes these factors differently. This means that a sender's reputation score varies from mailbox provider to mailbox provider. With some providers, these decisions are made on an individual inbox level. And if a sender has multiple domain names and sends from different IP addresses, each will have its own separate reputation score.

What are the different kinds of emails that I can send?

Attentive emails are divided into three categories:

• Transactional email messages, which contain no marketing content of any kind and instead give transactional updates about a subscriber, including successful purchase, shipping, and package delivered messages. For more, see What are transactional journeys?
• Triggered email messages are generated when a subscriber does something that triggers a journey, like abandoning their shopping cart or an item they’ve shown interest in is back in stock. For more, see What are journeys?
• Campaign email messages are sent by you to one or more segments of your subscribers. Campaign email messages are best-suited for content like new product announcements, sales or discounts, or newsletters. For more, see Create email campaigns with Campaign Composer.

What does 250ok mean?

250ok is the response that Attentive receives from subscriber email hosting providers when a message is accepted. 250ok does not mean that the email was delivered to the subscriber’s inbox. It means only that the email hosting provider accepted the message. 

Does “Delivered” mean that my email went to a subscriber’s inbox?

No. Delivered means that the email was accepted via 250ok, but the email message is still subject to filtering from the email provider’s algorithms and the personal filters set up by individual subscribers.

Can Attentive see where my email messages land in subscriber email inboxes?

No, as this data is not shared by mailbox providers. However, we can estimate email placement in inboxes by other metrics like delivered rates, opens, bounces, blocks, and sender reputation.

What is “warming up” a domain, and why do I need to do it?

Warming an email domain refers to the process of building its positive reputation among email inbox providers and has a significant effect on whether your emails reach subscriber inboxes. For more on warming domains, see Send email warmup campaigns.

How long will Attentive try to deliver my email?

By default, we attempt to deliver email for a period of 72 hours. If your message isn’t delivered within 72 hours, then the email is dropped. Dropped messages do not mean that emails you send in the future will be blocked or suppressed.

Why are my open and/or click rates above 100%? 

Some mailbox providers use anti-spam technology that opens email messages and clicks on all links to ensure that the message and its contents are safe for your subscribers to view. 

What does “bounced” mean?

A bounce, or hard bounce, is one type of email delivery failure. Usually, emails bounce when subscriber email accounts are no longer active. You may also see the terms 5.x.x or 5xx to refer to bounced emails.

What does “blocked” mean?

A blocked email, or a soft bounce, is another type of email delivery failure. Usually, emails are blocked when subscriber email inboxes are full and can’t accept additional emails. Blocked emails are also used to indicate poor sender reputations or suspected spamming. You may also see the terms 4.x.x or 4xx to refer to blocked emails. 

What’s a spam trap?

Spam traps are email addresses created or repurposed by blocklist operators, ISPs, mailbox providers, and other organizations to identify spam. Spam trap email addresses are often found on purchased lists, which is one reason it’s important to never purchase a list.

There are three types of spam traps:

• Pristine: These are email addresses created by blocklist operators to catch spammers. They were never real email addresses to begin with. These addresses are often scraped from websites, purchased on auction sites, or traded on the dark web.
• Recycled: These are email addresses that were abandoned by the original account owner. When emails are sent to recycled spam traps, this indicates that the sender has poor list hygiene. They may not be regularly removing unengaged subscribers from their lists.
• Typo: These are email addresses with misspelled domains (e.g., googl.com, yahooo.com). When emails are sent to typo spam traps, this indicates that the sender has poor opt-in practices. For example, they may not use real-time validation to prevent common misspellings when subscribers opt in. These are considered less severe than pristine or recycled spam traps, but they can still harm your reputation.

Sending to any of these spam traps negatively affects sender reputation. Sending to pristine spam traps has the most severe consequences for sender reputation.

For best practices that can help prevent you from sending to spam traps, see Best practices: email deliverability. For more email deliverability troubleshooting, see Troubleshoot email deliverability issues.

What’s a blocklist?

A blocklist is a list of IP addresses or domain names suspected of suspicious activity, like sending spam or phishing emails.

There are two main kinds of blocklists:

• external: A blocklist maintained by a third party, e.g., Spamhaus.
• internal: A blocklist maintained by a mailbox provider (e.g., Google for Gmail) or organization (e.g., a company that uses Gmail for email).

Each blocklist uses its own criteria to determine whether IP addresses or domains are suspicious. This can make it difficult to understand how and why an IP or domain was added to the blocklist—and how it can be removed.

Getting domains or IP addresses removed from blocklists is different for each blocklist. For internal blocklists, you must communicate directly with the entity that's blocking your email. That could be a mailbox provider (e.g., Google for Gmail) or an organization. For external blocklists, many have publicly available policies and processes you can follow to get delisted.

Following deliverability best practices and troubleshooting deliverability issues can also help prevent your domains or IP addresses from being included on blocklists.

What’s a role account?

Role accounts are email accounts that are usually monitored by multiple people in an organization that all share a role within their organization. When possible, you should avoid sending email messages to role accounts, as they typically result in higher spam reports and unsubscribers since the message will likely be viewed by more than one person.

You can typically identify role account email address when the local-part of the email address is a role instead of the name of a person. The local-part of an email address are the characters that come before the @ in an email address. For example, the local-part of hello@attentivemobile.com is hello. 

For a list of common role account local-parts, check out Common role account email addresses.

What are disposable email addresses?

Disposable email addresses are typically used by people who want to hide their identity, don’t want to share their email address with a given company, or want to receive multiple discount codes or special offers. Internet trolls, vandals, and other bad actors often use disposable email addresses to evade bans and restrictions placed on their accounts.

In general, you shouldn't include any temporary email addresses in your messaging campaigns. For a list of commonly used disposable email address domains, check out Disposable email address domains.