Alerts
Notifications is what the platform noticed about your sending. Epostix watches each of your active sending domains and raises an alert when hard bounces on its transactional mail, sent through the API or SMTP, climb far enough to threaten your reputation. Campaign mail is not part of this alert.
What raises an alert
The bounce alert is about hard bounces only: messages a receiving server refused permanently because the address does not exist. Those are the bounces providers judge you on, and the ones that say something is wrong with where your addresses came from. See bounce rate and suppression for how hard bounces differ from the rest.
Alerts are measured per sending domain, across all of your recipients. Epostix looks at a 24-hour period of transactional mail from that domain, ending about an hour before each check so that late bounces have time to arrive. The rate covers messages that were delivered or refused because the address does not exist. Messages still being retried, and messages that failed for any other reason, are left out. Each alert shows the exact period it covers.
An alert is raised only when the share of hard bounces is clearly high and enough messages stand behind it. A handful of bounces in a small batch produces a frightening percentage that means nothing, and it never raises an alert. Low-volume sending will therefore rarely trigger one, which is correct, but it also means an alert is not the only way a problem shows up. The Overview is.
Soft bounces, such as a full mailbox or a server that asks you to try again later, do not raise alerts. They are usually temporary and are retried on their own.
Complaints do not raise an alert here either. A recipient marking your message as spam is handled separately; see complaints.
How often you hear about it
At most one bounce alert per sending domain every 24 hours. A domain that keeps bouncing produces one entry for the day, not one every time Epostix checks.
A bounce alert is a warning and appears on this screen only. It is not emailed.
Working through them
Needs attention is the default view and shows what you have not acknowledged yet. The count next to it is repeated in the sidebar, so an unread alert is visible from any screen. Everything adds the alerts you have already dealt with.
Both dropdowns narrow the list further: Any severity to Critical, Warning or Info, and Any type to one kind of notification, such as Bounce rate.
A bounce alert carries the numbers behind it: the period it covers, how many messages were
refused out of how many were delivered or refused this way, the rate, and the receiving domains with the most refusals. An
alert for lumenmail.eu might show that most of its refusals came from hexa.de, which tells
you whether the problem is one provider or your list as a whole.
The fix is almost always at the source of the addresses. Check where they came from, for example a signup form that does not confirm the address, or an old import that has not been mailed in a long time.
Open domain goes to the sending domain named in the alert, which is where anything about it gets fixed.
Acknowledging
Acknowledge marks an alert as dealt with and moves it out of Needs attention. Acknowledge all does the same for everything currently unacknowledged.
Acknowledging is a record that you looked, not a fix. It changes nothing about your sending and it does not stop the alert returning. If the hard-bounce rate is still high 24 hours later, a new alert is raised for the same domain.
An acknowledged alert keeps its full detail and shows when it was acknowledged, so the history of what went wrong stays readable after the fact.