When an import is held for review

Some imports land on your list marked as waiting for review, and go out to nobody until one of us has looked at them. Nothing else about your newsletter changes, the rest of your list is untouched, and the message in the product tells you it has happened before you leave the page.

The four things that hold an import

An import waits if any one of these is true, and Issue Mint records which one it was.

• More than 5,000 rows. Size alone.
• A trial account importing more than 500 rows. Trials are where abuse starts, so the bar is lower until there is a subscription behind the account.
• An import that would at least double your list. A newsletter with 400 subscribers adding 900 in one file is a different event from the same file arriving on a list of 30,000, whatever the row count says.
• A risk score of 50 or more, out of 100. Read from the addresses themselves, described below.

Everything here is measured before a single address goes active. Below all four thresholds, which covers most imports, nothing happens and you would never know this existed.

What the risk score reads

The score is calculated from the addresses in the file rather than the file itself, so a scrape with a respectable name gets no benefit from it. Five signals contribute.

• Role addresses, the info@, sales@ and admin@ shape, which are what a company website gives up to a scraper.
• Disposable domains, the throwaway inbox services.
• Valid but implausible addresses, meaning a local part that is nothing but digits, or one carrying a run of six or more.
• Concentration on one domain, excluding the free mail providers, because a list that is 70 per cent gmail.com is an ordinary consumer list. It only counts once ten or more addresses share one company domain.
• Addresses that have already complained, anywhere on the platform.

None of them is conclusive on its own, and plenty of honest lists carry a few role addresses, so each signal is weighted by how much of the file it covers. One info@ address in five thousand is worth almost nothing. Half the file being info@ is worth a lot. The result is a score and a list of reasons for a person to read, not a verdict a machine reaches on its own.

What waiting for review means for the addresses

Held addresses are written to your list immediately, with the status Waiting for review, and they are present without being mailable.

You can see them, search them, count them and export them. No issue goes to them, a signup form will not release one early, and they are outside the active count that decides your plan and the subscriber cap on hosted sending. They are also left out of the growth chart on purpose: counting them would put a spike of several thousand people on the day the file landed, and refusing the import afterwards would delete the rows and leave the spike behind for ever. Release them and the affected days are recalculated, so people who really did join appear on the day they arrived.

What you are told, and when

Three times, without you having to look for it.

The message after you confirm the import says it is imported and waiting on a quick check from us. The import itself reads Importing while the rows land and then Waiting for review once they are all in. And the email that arrives when the reading finishes says how many addresses were found, states plainly that nobody has been emailed and nothing has been sent, and invites you to reply if it is time sensitive. There is no stated turnaround, because a promise we cannot keep at three in the morning is worse than none, and it rarely takes long.

How a review ends

Two ways, and both of them tell you.

Released. The held addresses become active, dated from the moment of the release, and they receive your next issue like anybody else. The growth chart is recalculated for the days they arrived. The email says all clear and says the check was a one-off.

Refused. The held addresses are deleted, and only those: anything that was on your list before the import stays exactly as it was, and nobody has been emailed at any point. The email quotes the reason verbatim, because a few thousand people leaving your list with no explanation reads as data loss, and invites you to tell us more about where the list came from if we have got it wrong.

Why hosted sending is the only mode this applies to

Every threshold on this page applies to hosted sending and to nothing else.

If your issues go out through your own Amazon SES or SMTP account, imports are never held, whatever their size or score. The controls exist because a shared sending reputation means one bought list damages everybody on it, and on your own account the reputation is yours: your delivery, your decision. The one import control that still applies either way is the check for domains that cannot receive mail, because that one saves you bounces rather than restraining you.