Some of my customers use one of the mailbox monitoring services out there. One of them consistently has 97% or better inbox delivery. On those few occasions when their delivery drops to 90%, they contact me to find out what the problem is. This happened recently and I spent some time digging through their delivery logs to see what I could determine.
The logs are showing that all the mail to domainA is delivered, except for 6 addresses sitting in the delayed email queue. Those six addresses are the exact addresses that the monitoring company uses. At domainB I see something similar, all the mail has been delivered except for mail to the monitoring addresses. In this case, domainB is deferring the mail with a rejection message that says too much email is being sent to these addresses and the domain is throttling them.
The important thing to remember about this is that the 100% missing statistic only says that the mail to the monitoring addresses is missing, it says nothing about mail to the actual list subscribers. In this case, I can see that the mail is not missing, it’s sitting in the outbound queue waiting to be retried.
Mark Brownlow has an ongoing series about using the right language when talking about delivery.
The most famous example is probably “open rate” which says nothing about how many people opened your email. Hence calls to rename it the render rate.
Another example is delivery rate, which says nothing about how many of your emails were delivered to the inbox.
Yes. Exactly.
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