Legacy Email Activity

If you are looking for the new Email Activity documentation, please go here.

The Email Activity feed allows you to view a snapshot of email-related activity associated with your account. These logs display all of your email events - filter by event type or search by email address.

Email activity shows the most recent 500 events. To access data in real time, implement our Event Webhook.

Filtering the Activity Feed

To filter by event type:

  1. On the Email Activity page, in the filter drop down, click the checkbox next to “All Filters”.
  2. Select individual event types to filter. The activity feed refreshes with the event types you selected.

Searching the Activity Feed

To search the Activity feed by email, mailbox name or domain name:

  • To search by email, enter the recipient’s entire email address into the search field and click enter.
  • To search by mailbox name (the part of an email before the @ symbol), enter the mailbox name into the search field and click enter.
  • To search by domain name (the part of an email after the @ symbol), enter the domain into the search field and click enter.

Subuser email activity

To see a subuser’s email activity, log in as that subuser or impersonate the subuser account.

You cannot see a parent accounts email activity from a subuser account.

Email Events

The Email Activity feed allows you to view specific information about messages sent from your account.

Event Description
Processed Requests from your website, application, or mail client via SMTP Relay or the API that SendGrid processed.
Clicks Whenever a recipient clicks one of the Click Tracked links in your email.
Delivered The accepted response generated by the recipients' mail server.
Opens The response generated by a recipient opening an email.
Unsubscribes Whenever a recipient unsubscribes from your emails.
Group Unsubscribes Whenever a recipient unsubscribes from a suppression group.
Group Resubscribes When a recipient resubscribes themselves to a suppression group.
Deferred The recipient mail server asked SendGrid to stop sending emails so fast.
Drops SendGrid will drop an email when the contact on that email is in one of your suppression groups, the recipient email previously bounced, or that recipient has marked your email as spam.
Bounces The receiving server could not or would not accept the message. If a recipient has previously unsubscribed from your emails, your attempt to send to them is bounced.
Blocks When your IP address has been blocked by an ISP or messaging organization. Blocks are less severe than bounces and do not result in permanent suppressions: subsequent sends to blocked email addresses are not automatically suppressed.
Spam Reports Whenever a recipient marks your email as spam and their mail server tells us about it.
Parse Triggered if you're using the Inbound Parse Webhook.

Troubleshooting

Checking delivery status of a specific email

You can check email delivery status by using the Email Activity page, or by using the Event Webhook.

  • For a successful delivery, the Email Activity page, or the Event Webhook shows a delivered event - expanding it shows a reason code of 250 OK. This means the receiving server has accepted the message. You can also check bounced, deferred, and processed messages.

  • If you can't find an email on the Email Activity page, check your suppression lists; bounces, blocks, spam reports, invalid email.

  • Have the recipient check their spam folder.

Deferrals

In your logs, you may see the following error messages accompanying a deferral event:

  • Email was deferred due to the following reason(s): ["IPs reached ISP-suggested hourly limits" http://send.gd/1uKnEBh]
    • This deferral means you've been going over IP warmup limits on a new IP. For more information about IP Warmup, see Warming up an IP Address.
  • Email was deferred due to the following reason(s): ["IPs reached ISP-suggested max connection limits: http://send.gd/1uKnEBh"]
    • This deferral is created by SendGrid to control the rate of delivery by ISP to help prevent throttling and spam folder delivery. Sending too much mail too fast can cause different mail providers to be suspicious of the mail, and that impacts deliverability. This automatic deferral was put in place to allow senders to send as much mail as you want at once, without impacting your deliverability.
  • Email was deferred due to the following reason(s): ["IPs reached max port limit"]
    • This deferral is generated by SendGrid when your sending IPs have reached the maximum number of ports available on our proxies. To reduce the number of these deferrals, you should add additional IP addresses to your account.
  • Email was deferred due to the following reason(s): ["IP reached max connection limit"]

Drops

A drop occurs when you try to send a message to an email address listed on one of the suppression lists: Bounces, Unsubscribes, Spam reports and Invalid Emails. If an email is already on one of the lists, our systems automatically drop the email to protect your Sender Reputation.

A dropped message cannot be resent automatically. To resend a message, first remove the email from the suppression list, and then recreate and resend the email.

Bounces

A bounce is a Drop event that occurs when a message to an address has previously Bounced.

You can visit the Bounces list under the Suppressions tab, and search the address to find the details of the original attempt, such as the date and full error reason code. Once an address is on this list, we do not attempt to deliver further messages to it; we drop the message to protect your external reputation.

A bounced message cannot be resent automatically. To resend a message, first remove the email from the suppression list, and then recreate and resend the email.

A delayed bounce occurs when a recipient server accepts a message (Delivered) and then is promptly declined (Bounced). This is an infrequent occurrence, and SendGrid treats these messages as a bounce, and any future sends to this address are dropped, unless you remove the email from your bounce suppression list.

Removing an email from a suppression list

SendGrid automatically drops emails sent to addresses on suppression lists. If you want to retry sending an email to an address that is on a suppressions list, you need to remove it from the list first.

Only remove emails from these lists if you're sure the recipients want to receive the email. Otherwise, continuously sending to recipients who don't want your emails can negatively impact your sender reputation.

To remove an email from a suppression list:

  1. In the UI, under Suppressions, navigate to the suppression list that you want to remove a recipient from: Global Unsubscribes, Group Unsubscribes, Bounces, Spam Reports, Blocks, or Invalid.
  2. Select the email you want to remove.
  3. In the drop-down menu on the top right of the screen, select Remove selected emails.

Setting up bounce forwarding

You can receive bounce notifications to a specific address by enabling the "Forward Bounces" feature in your account and defining the forwarding address. However, you can also set it to send any bounces back to the originating FROM address.

To receive a bounce notification report to the FROM address on the email that bounced:

  1. Navigate to Mail Settings and select Forward Bounce.
  2. Toggle the slider to on
  3. Leave the "Use the from address" box ticked.
  4. Leave the email address entry field blank.

If you are sending bounce messages to a Gmail account, you need to set up an email filter in your inbox to tell Gmail not to send these messages to your spam folder.

When Gmail doesn’t see a corresponding message in the sent folder connecting the bounce message, it may decide that the bounce message isn’t valid and send it to spam.

One way to do this is in the filter, set up From daemon and Has the words daemon, and check the box Never send it to Spam.

These are some common issues people see with reading their email activity feed.

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