Email Delivery Statuses

At indigitall, we track every email campaign to provide you with clear, actionable insights. Understanding what each status means will help you accurately analyze your reports, evaluate subscriber engagement, and optimize your overall email strategy.

1. Core Delivery Statuses

Before measuring user engagement, it is important to know whether your emails successfully reached their destination:

• Delivered: The recipient's email server accepted the message. Note: This indicates successful delivery to the server, but it does not guarantee the email landed in the primary inbox (it could still be placed in the spam or promotions folder).
• Bounced: The email could not be delivered.
  • Soft Bounce: A temporary delivery failure (e.g., the recipient’s mailbox is full or their server is temporarily down).
  • Hard Bounce: A permanent failure (e.g., a non-existent or misspelled email address). The system automatically blocks future sends to hard-bounced addresses to protect your sender reputation.
• Blocked / Pre-blocked: The platform proactively prevents the email from being sent because the recipient previously unsubscribed, marked your emails as spam, or the content triggered strict pre-send anti-spam filters.
• Retrying: The system is actively attempting to redeliver the message after a temporary issue on the recipient’s server. It will continue trying for up to 24 hours before marking it as a soft bounce.
• Queued: The message has been accepted by our platform and is waiting in line to be processed and sent out.

2. Key Engagement Indicators

Once an email is delivered, we track how your audience interacts with it:

• Clicked: The recipient clicked at least one link inside your email (excluding the unsubscribe link). Clicks are tracked via unique redirect URLs and are highly reliable indicators of user interest.
• Unsubscribed: The recipient opted out of your mailing list by clicking the mandatory unsubscribe link.
• Spam Complaints: The recipient manually clicked "Mark as Spam" or "Report Spam" inside their email client. Keeping this rate low is critical to avoiding domain blacklisting.

3. Deep Dive: Email Opens & Open Rates

The Open Rate is the percentage of unique opens relative to the total number of successfully delivered emails. While it is one of the most common metrics used to monitor campaign performance over time, it is important to understand that email open tracking is an estimate, not an exact science.

How Email Open Tracking Works

When you send an email campaign, a tiny, invisible 1x1 pixel tracking image is embedded into the message. When the recipient’s email client loads that image, our system records an "Open."

Why Open Metrics Can Be Inaccurate

Due to modern security standards and privacy features, open tracking can face technical discrepancies:

• Image Blocking (False Negatives): Many email clients (like Microsoft Outlook or strict corporate firewalls) disable automated image loading by default. If a subscriber reads your entire email but does not click "Load Images," the tracking pixel never loads, and the open will not be recorded.
• Privacy Protections (False Positives): Features like Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) automatically pre-fetch and cache all email images on proxy servers as soon as an email arrives. This triggers a automatic false open, making it look like the user opened the email immediately, even if they never actually looked at it.
• Security & Anti-Malware Scanners: Some corporate mail networks use automated tools to open incoming emails and test links for security threats before delivering them to the end user, generating automated false opens.
• Plain Text Formatting: If a recipient views an email in pure plain-text mode, tracking pixels cannot load, making tracking impossible.

Key Open Metrics Explained

In your indigitall dashboard, you will see a breakdown of specific open indicators:

• Total Opens: The total number of times your email was opened (including multiple opens by the same recipient).
• Unique Opens (Opened Messages): The count of individual recipients who opened your email at least once (each contact is only counted once).
• Average Opens per Message: Total Opens divided by Unique Opens, showing how often an engaged subscriber revisits your content.
• Open Delay: The average time it takes for a user to open the email after it reaches their inbox.

Best Practices for indigitall Clients

Because technical factors (like Apple MPP and image blocking) distort absolute open rates, you should:

1. Monitor Trends, Not Just Absolute Numbers: Use your open rate as a benchmark. If your typical open rate drops suddenly (e.g., from 25% down to 5%), it serves as an early warning sign that your emails might be heading to the spam folder.
2. Focus on Click Rates for True Engagement: Since clicking a link requires active user interaction and is unaffected by image blocking or pre-fetching, the Click Rate remains the most reliable and precise metric for measuring true audience engagement.