Mailbox Monitor

Overview

Mailbox Monitor is a tool that helps you see if your campaigns reach the end user. A Mailbox Monitor event can show you problems with specific ISPs as well as content. While the Sender Score is a great way to know your IP reputation, it is very valuable to see how particular campaigns do with particular ISPs.

How it works

We have a seed list of hundreds of email addresses at dozens of the largest ISPs. When you select and pay for a Mailbox Monitor event, we send your campaign to those seed addresses in the exact same way your subscribers receive. They will come from your dedicated IP and contain all of the same content as your subscribers will see. Then, these seed emails are monitored to see if they receive your email. It will either show up in the Inbox, Bulk Folder or go Missing.

Each ISP, depending on size of the market they command, will have a different number of seed email addresses. The percentages that you see are after we calculate based on the number of seeds. At this time, we are only providing the totals for US domains. We plan to include international monitoring soon. The totals (at the bottom) are for all domains, including International.

Inbox

Not to state the obvious, but, your goal is always to reach the Inbox. With a Mailbox Monitor event, you can see if your campaign made it to the Inbox. The higher the Inbox rate (percentage of emails to reach the Inbox) the better your overall email delivery is.

Bulk

If the results of the Mailbox Monitor show that your campaign is reaching the bulk folder, there may be a problem with delivery. Not all ISPs that we monitor actually have bulk or spam folders, but of those that do we can monitor. Some common reasons for bulking: content, IP reputation and complain rates. If you see consistent bulking to a certain ISP, there could be issues with your IP address being blocked. Follow the help guidelines provided on the Mailbox Monitor results page.

Missing

If a seed email doesn't receive the email, it will display as missing. Missing emails can be caused by several reasons.

• The ISP does not offer a Bulk or Spam folder, and therefore a missing email may mean that the email was rejected.

• There was a connection issue with that particular ISP and we could not receive results from them. Therefore we have no indication that it made it (or didn't make it).

• The email was rejected by an ISP that has a bulk/spam folder, and didn't let it come in at all. This can be due to content, as well as IP reputation.

Troublshooting

If you have any issues with a particular ISP, we will provide you assistance with how to resolve it. Please refer to the individual help articles that are supplied in the Mailbox Monitor results for instructions.