What decides whether an email arrives

An email makes three stops on its way to a reader. Jounce owns the first one. The reader’s mail provider owns the other two.

The three stops

1. Jounce sends it. Before a send, Jounce counts out everyone it can’t reach: people who unsubscribed, bounced, or complained, and any address on the shared list of dead addresses. The email goes to everyone else. See Why is Jounce skipping some people?.
2. Their mail provider accepts it or refuses it. A refusal for good is a bounce, and Jounce stops sending to that address. On the results page, Delivered counts everyone the provider accepted. See Bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes.
3. The provider files it. It lands in the inbox, in a tab such as Gmail’s Promotions, or in spam. Only the reader sees which. Jounce learns about it only when they open, click, unsubscribe, or mark it as spam.

So a person can be Delivered on the results page and still not see your email. That is the third stop, and Why did my email land in spam or promotions? covers it.

What Jounce does on your side

Every email you send carries the things mail providers look for.

• A sender they can check. With your own domain authenticated, your emails are signed as yours. Until then they go out from Jounce’s own sending domain. See Send from your own domain.
• An unsubscribe link. Jounce writes one at the bottom of every marketing email and honors the mail app’s own Unsubscribe button. A reader who can leave doesn’t reach for Report spam. See The unsubscribe link and page.
• Your postal address in the footer, which marketing email is required to carry.
• A clean list. Anyone who asked to stop, or whose address is dead, is skipped on every send. Sending to them anyway is what pushes a sender toward spam folders.
• Notes before you send. The editor’s Before you send and the Review step point out what’s worth fixing. That includes a play button that opens nothing, an email that is mostly images, one Gmail would cut short, and http:// links. See What Jounce checks before it sends.

What only the reader controls

Which folder the email lands in, whether images load, and whether they open it. Their provider sorts by what it knows about the sender and by how that reader treats similar mail.

Jounce can’t see into an inbox. So a subscriber’s page never says delivered to the inbox. It says what they did. See Find out whether an email reached someone.