Communication analysis

Permission scope: EVERYONE

Two shapes of the same question. For one person, Alphie checks whether they have an address at all, whether this gym has them unsubscribed, whether the address is blocked at our email provider, whether anything sent to them has bounced, and what was actually delivered, opened and clicked. For the whole gym, it reviews every address that has bounced recently and works out which of those are still wrong on the record today – so what comes back is a list of things to fix, not a history of things that already went wrong.

Example questions and prompts

• Sarah says she never got her booking confirmation.
• Did our newsletter actually reach this member?
• This enquirer says we never replied – did we?
• Do I have any email problems I need to sort out?
• Are my emails getting through?
• Which members have bad email addresses?
• Has that member’s address ever bounced on us?
• We fixed her email – is it working now?

Worth knowing

• A very common finding is that nothing was wrong. “Delivered on Tuesday at 09:14 and opened at 11:32” may be the correct response.
• Alphie never guesses at a typo: he reports the address and lets a human read it. He never says “no email was sent”, only “no record within the period the log covers”. And where an address is blocked at the provider, he says so without implying the gym did it.
• The gym-wide scan returns the counts and the first few names in the answer itself, and a spreadsheet of everyone affected – name, current address, the address that bounced, when, how many times, and where to fix it. Nothing actionable means no file at all.
• For one person, Alphie also reports whether anything sent to them has bounced – and compares the address that bounced against the one on the record now, so a problem somebody has already fixed reads as fixed rather than as an outstanding fault.
• “Opened” does not mean “read”. An open is recorded when the tracking image in the email loads – and most modern mail apps now load that automatically, without the recipient looking at anything. Across the whole platform opens run at roughly four in five delivered emails, which is far above any believable real rate. Treat an open as good evidence the email arrived and weak evidence anyone read it. A click is stronger, though even that is not proof: corporate mail security follows every link automatically to check it. Alphie words all of this carefully.
• An old delivery is not a current one. Where the most recent thing Alphie can see is more than a month old, he says so and says the history describes what used to happen rather than what happens now.