How to send emails

Before you send emails, ensure you have configured your project and verified your email and domain, and added subscribers by using the API or importing the mailing list.

Legal provisions

Commercial email messages must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. You need to comply if the primary purpose of your email is commercial. A primary purpose is commercial when your email contains primarily commercial content. Transactional or other non-commercial emails may not contain false or misleading information, but don’t fall under the CAN-SPAM Act regulations.

Learn more about how to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act

Pushwoosh requires the following in each email you send (normally in the footer): Company Address, City, State, Zip Code, Country.

If you operate in the EU, make sure you comply with GDPR regulations. Learn more

Pushwoosh offers two ways to send emails:

One-time emails

Send a single email to a segment, an email list, or all subscribers. Schedule it for now or a specific date and time.

Send one-time emails

Email element in Customer Journey

Add an email step to a journey and combine it with push, in-app, SMS, or WhatsApp. Trigger delivery by audience or events.

Send emails via Customer Journey

Tip

Use one-time emails for single campaigns and Customer Journey for automated, multi-channel flows.

Submit transactional email over SMTP

If a service already speaks SMTP, send transactional email through the SMTP gateway instead of calling the API directly. The gateway forwards each message to Messaging API v2 Notify.

SMTP gateway

Delivery and compliance

Bulk emails

Please note that each recipient email address should be valid. Even if one of recipient email addresses is invalid, it might result in the whole delivery rejection and an increase in hard bounce rate.

A recipient email address is the one specified in any destination field (To, Cc, Bcc).

To help you avoid a significant increase in hard bounce rate and spam filtering, Pushwoosh does not send out bulk emails. When you target an audience segment (or your entire audience), we send a separate message to each recipient in this segment. Still, each email address you are sending to must be valid. Otherwise, your email deliverability can be affected, and sending suspension may come as a result.

List-Unsubscribe header

Pushwoosh adds a List-Unsubscribe header to each email so that mail clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) know where users can unsubscribe. Subscribers can opt out in one click from the mailbox interface. That keeps subscription status in order and reduces complaints and spam flags.

Pre-send email audit

Before you send a one-time email, run an audit in the one-time email wizard. Pushwoosh sends a test message to a verified address and checks content quality and compliance, including link health, unsubscribe headers, and spam indicators. Learn how to audit your email.

Sending suspension

Pushwoosh always provides you with clean and trusted IP addresses, but in some cases, we can suspend your email delivery.

Pushwoosh measures complaint and bounce rates across all projects in your account, over a limit period set by your plan (14 days by default). It checks them once at least 1,000 emails were sent in that period.

When a rate crosses its limit, Pushwoosh pauses email sending in the project that received the bounce or complaint:

• Complaint rate: if it reaches your plan’s limit (1% of emails sent by default), Pushwoosh pauses email sending in the project and suggests that you check email content and template.
• Hard bounce rate: if it exceeds your plan’s limit (5% of emails sent by default), Pushwoosh pauses email sending in the project and checks your email database manually.
• Soft bounce rate: if it exceeds 90% of emails sent, Pushwoosh pauses email sending in the project.
• Spam-related bounce rate: if bounces whose server response mentions spam exceed 90% of emails sent, Pushwoosh pauses email sending in the project. Both hard and soft bounces count here, not only the Soft Bounce Spam type in Email error types.

To resume sending after a suspension, contact Pushwoosh Support.

When bounces rise sharply, Pushwoosh sends a bounce spike warning before they reach these limits.