When sending emails in Conversion, emails are sent to recipients rather than directly to contacts. Understanding how recipients work is important for maintaining deliverability, staying compliant with email regulations, and keeping your contact list healthy.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.conversion.ai/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
How recipients work
Deduplication by email address. If two or more contacts share the same email address, they are mapped to a single recipient. This ensures the same inbox never receives the same email more than once. Subscription status. Each recipient carries a subscription status that controls whether they can receive marketing emails from your organization.Subscription status
Every recipient has one of the following statuses:| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| No status | The default state for new recipients. Conversion will not send marketing emails to these recipients. |
| Subscribed | The recipient has opted in and can receive marketing emails. |
| Unsubscribed | The recipient has opted out and will not receive marketing emails. |
| Bounced | An email sent to this recipient has hard bounced. Conversion will not attempt to send further emails to this address. The email address is also added to Conversion’s global bounce list, which prevents delivery across all Conversion users. |
| Global bounced | This recipient’s email was detected on Conversion’s global bounce list, which tracks bounces across all Conversion users. |
| Complained | The recipient has marked an email as spam. Conversion will not send further emails to this address. |
This subscription model helps keep you compliant with regulations like GDPR, which require explicit consent before sending marketing communications.
How unsubscribing works
A recipient’s status is only set to Unsubscribed when they toggle off the global Unsubscribe from all option. Topic-level preferences alone do not change the recipient’s subscription status. This means:- If a recipient toggles off one or more marketing topics but leaves the global toggle on, their status remains unchanged.
- If a recipient toggles off every individual topic but leaves the global toggle on, their status still remains unchanged. This is intentional — it signals that the recipient is open to receiving emails on new topics your organization may add in the future.
Setting subscription status
You can set a recipient’s subscription status when adding or updating contacts in Conversion: Forms: Enable the Automatically subscribe contacts toggle in your form’s General Settings. Contacts who submit the form will be marked as subscribed if they previously had no subscription status. Workflows: Use the Update Subscription Status workflow node to update the contact’s subscription status. CSV upload: When importing contacts via CSV, toggle the option to subscribe the imported contacts. New contacts will be subscribed to marketing emails. Existing contacts with no subscription status will also be subscribed. API: Pass the subscription status field when creating or updating a contact through the Conversion API. Contacts view: You can edit multiple contacts’ subscription statuses in the Contacts table view, or individually per contact.Viewing recipients of an email
- Status - describes the outcome or action of a recipient (ex. “Clicked”)
- Reason - a detailed reason describing the status
- Opens - the number of times this recipient opened the email
- Clicks - the number of times this recipient clicked a link in the email
These are measured with bots filtered out.
Possible email statuses
Below are the possible statuses for an email recipient. The following recipient statuses are listed in priority order — higher priority statuses take precedence in the display (ex. “Clicked” overrides “Opened”).| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Not sent | This email was not sent to the recipient (failed inbox validation, the email address was on Conversion’s global bounce list, etc.) |
| Complained | The recipient marked this email as spam |
| Unsubscribed | The recipient unsubscribed from at least one topic through this email |
| Bounced | This email hard bounced from the recipient’s inbox. The recipient’s status is set to “bounced” and the email address is added to Conversion’s global bounce list. |
| Soft bounced | This email soft bounced from the recipient’s inbox |
| Clicked | The recipient clicked a link in this email |
| Opened | The recipient opened this email |
| Delivered | This email was delivered to the recipient’s mail server |
| Sent | This email was successfully sent to the recipient |
”Not Sent” reasons
Below are all possible reasons an email was not sent:| Reason | Description |
|---|---|
| Recipient was previously unsubscribed | The recipient’s subscription status was “unsubscribed” when this email attempted to send. |
| Recipient was marked as bounced | The recipient’s subscription status was “bounced” when this email attempted to send. |
| Recipient was on the global bounced list | The recipient’s subscription status was “global bounced” when this email attempted to send.* |
| Recipient was marked as complained | The recipient’s subscription status was “complained” when this email attempted to send. |
| Recipient had no subscription status | The recipient had no subscription status when this email attempted to send. They were never explicitly subscribed, so the system treats them as ineligible. |
| Recipient is unsubscribed from this topic | The recipient is globally subscribed but has specifically unsubscribed from the marketing topic assigned to this email. |
| Recipient email is not valid | The email address failed basic format validation (e.g. malformed address). |
| Recipient email failed inbox validation | The recipient failed Conversion’s email address validation check (powered by ZeroBounce). |
| Recipient is in the global bounced list | The recipient is on Conversion’s global bounce list, which tracks email addresses that have hard bounced for other Conversion users.* |
| The recipient email has reached the communication limit of N emails per day | The recipient has already received the maximum allowed emails for the current day. |
| The recipient email has reached the communication limit of N emails per week | The recipient has already received the maximum allowed emails for the current week. |
| The recipient email has reached the communication limit of N emails per month | The recipient has already received the maximum allowed emails for the current month. |
| The same email has been sent to this recipient 3 times in the last 8 hours | An internal safety limit that prevents the exact same email from sending to a recipient too many times. |
*The first time an email is attempted to be sent to an address on Conversion’s global bounce list, the not sent reason is set to “Recipient is in the global bounced list” and the recipient’s status is set to “global bounced.”The next time an email is attempted to send to that recipient, because the recipient status is “global bounced,” the not sent reason is instead “Recipient was on the global bounced list.”
If an email is not sent because the recipient failed ZeroBounce inbox validation, the recipient’s subscription status is not changed. Conversion simply skips sending the email.