A first send that waits for review

A first send to more than 2,000 recipients waits for one of us to look at it before it goes out. Below that figure, which covers nearly every newsletter, nothing happens and this page describes something you will never meet.

It is a one-off. Once an account has had one send cleared, every issue after it goes straight out.

When it happens

Three things have to be true at the same time: the account has never sent an issue, the issue is going out on hosted sending rather than your own Amazon SES or SMTP account, and the list is above 2,000 active subscribers.

The profile that describes is narrow and deliberate. Somebody who registers, imports thousands of addresses and immediately mails all of them is the case the whole of our abuse handling is written about. A curator who builds a list over a year and sends their first issue to four hundred people never touches this, and neither does anybody whose second issue is their first big one.

You are told three times

Before you press send, the publish panel says that a first send to a list this size gets a look from us, that it is a one-off, and that you will be emailed either way. That is the first.

The second is the message immediately after you press it, which says the issue has been sent for a quick check rather than reporting an error, because nothing has gone wrong and nothing you did caused it. The third is an email, which repeats it and says plainly that nothing has been sent and nothing is lost. Three, because a tab you read a confirmation in is not somewhere a promise should live, and because the email is also the record of when you were told, which matters if the check takes longer than the sentence in it implies.

What happens while it waits

The issue moves to its own status, waiting for review. It is not put back to a draft, because you pressed send and a list calling it a draft would be telling you nothing happened.

Nothing has been mailed at that point. No recipient list has been taken and no message has been handed to a provider, so a release later starts the send from the beginning through exactly the same path as any other issue. The issue is frozen while it waits, and that is the point of it: whoever releases it is approving the issue in front of them, and an owner who could edit in the meantime could have one thing reviewed and another thing sent.

Reviews usually take a few hours. If the issue is time sensitive, reply to the email and say so, because that reaches a person.

Released, or refused

A release sends the issue and emails you to say it is on its way, and that the check was a one-off. From that moment the account is governed by the ordinary sending limits, which are set out on sending limits, and nothing waits for anybody again.

A refusal puts the issue back to a draft you can edit, with the reason written on it where the composer shows it. The account stays unreviewed in that case, deliberately, so a second attempt is looked at again rather than sailing through.

Why the warm-up ramp makes it necessary

A new account may send 1,000 emails a day, and that ceiling doubles every clean week up to your plan’s limit. It is ordinary sender warm-up, and on its own it is a good defence.

The gap it leaves is that the ramp counts weeks on the calendar rather than issues sent. An account that registers and then sits quiet for a month has built no reputation at all, and has still accrued a daily ceiling in the tens of thousands, every one of them spendable on a first ever send. This review is the control that covers that case, and it is why it is aimed at the first send specifically rather than at large sends in general.

The reason any of it matters is what a mailbox provider sees. A brand new sending address going to thousands of people is what a bought list looks like from their side, whether or not that is what it is, and hosted sending shares a reputation, so the cost of getting it wrong lands on other people’s newsletters as well as ours.

The same idea, on imports

A large import is held for the same reason and told to you the same way, on when an import is held. The two controls are separate, so an import that has been cleared does not clear a first send, and a cleared first send does not exempt a later import.