Newsletter Stats

Hi Perch, 

I've just sent out my first newsletter campaign for a client. It seemed to go rather well. I am particularly impressed with the stats provided by NLB but would like to learn a bit more about how they are generated.

There's some great info on this in the readme.txt:

TRACKING AND REPORTING

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On the "Messages" menu you will see some aggregate stats:

Opens - This is number of users who have "opened" a particular newsletter message.
We use the industry standard method of tracking "opens" which is to included
a transparent 1x1 GIF image in the content of the HTML message. We use a PHP script
to generate this image, and when it is loaded a log entry is added to the database
that the user "opened" the image. Note that some email clients don't show images
unless the users clicks "View images" so the "opens" number may be less than the
actual number of users who have seen your message, but it's a good indicator.

Also, NLB doesn't report how many messages were delivered and/or rejected. I assume there must be a technical reason for this as it would be handy information!

It's because there's no 100% accurate way to get this information.  As a spam prevention measure, some email servers don't give any indication when they receive an email that is for an address that doesn't have a valid email account.

The way to do it is to receive and parse all the bounce messages.  We haven't done that yet, and don't have current plans to, but it might be something we do in the future.  

Also note that some 3rd party mailers like https://www.mandrill.com/ provide stats on "bounces" for you.

Hope that helps!