Email monitoring alerts
Email Guardian automatically scans your selected emails every 24 hours for unexpected issues caused by email client updates and other external factors and checks for broken links that affect your content. Monitoring notifies you of any changes that might impact your subscribers’ experience.
NOTE: It may take up to 24 hours for a new version of your email to be reflected in email monitoring.
Types of impacts
Email monitoring keeps watch over select email clients, images, and links in your email. Monitored emails have icons in red or green so you can see their impact status at a glance.
Email client
Email client monitoring uses a custom comparison algorithm that is designed to detect substantive rendering changes while ignoring irrelevant differences such as anti-aliasing artifacts. Alerts may be based on:
- a medium-to-large image fails to load
- image loading failures that cause a noticeable shift in the layout of the email
- changes by the email client in the availability or functionality of an HTML/CSS feature that affects rendering throughout the email
- a font change that is visible across the majority of the email
Link and image
Link and image monitoring checks are pass or fail so any alert, excluding loading speed, will be considered an impact.
Check your monitored emails
Get an overall view from your Home or Monitor dashboards or select the Monitor tab in a project to check your emails' monitoring status and results.
A red shield icon with an exclamation point indicates an email with alerts, while a green shield icon with a check mark indicates no changes. The Impact column gives a quick overview of issues found.
Select any email to view its report and to resolve or ignore any alert issues.
Email client alerts
Expand the Email Clients dropdown in the right side pane to check on any client alerts. To view changes, use the red slider in your email view pane to compare your original email rendering with the most recent one. You will see the baseline screenshot on the left of the slider and the current capture on the right.
After correcting any issues, update your project Previews & QA to refresh your baseline snapshot for ongoing monitoring. You can also choose Dismiss alert if you prefer!
Link alerts
When a subscriber clicks a link, that request is sent to the website where your content is hosted. If the website can't return the content through the link provided, the hosted website will communicate using status codes. Codes often indicate client-side errors that can help your team resolve issues.
Expand the Links dropdown in the right side pane to review link alerts. Links are identified in your email preview pane with a red error link, blue monitored link, or gray skipped link icon.
The dropdown list uses a red x icon for broken links, and a green check icon for working links.
Choose any icon to open the Link journey sidebar on the right. Or you can select the link item in the pane and your preview will jump to its location in the email, as well as open the Link journey sidebar. First, any image associated with the link is identified, followed by the URL. Redirect URLs, if any, will appear next, including the response time for each of them. The Destination preview follows, showing a screenshot of the subscriber experience if they use the link. We include the total load time and provide a quick link to view your tracking and utm codes in your project's Previews & QA tab. The error message returned by the server is the last information section, along with a suggested step for correcting the issue. To share the error information, use the Copy to clipboard button to get a text version of the results. If you know your link is working correctly and do not want it monitored any longer, use the Ignore button and it won't be checked for as long as you monitor the email. If you change to a different URL, monitoring will resume. |
NOTE: In most cases, dynamic links can be monitored as long as we have a version of the email that is exactly the same as a subscriber would receive.
Image alerts
Expand the Images dropdown in the right side pane to review image alerts. Images are identified in your email preview pane with a red error image icon, blue monitored image icon, or gray skipped image icon. Embedded images are not currently monitored and will display a gray skip icon.
The dropdown list uses a red x icon for broken images, a green check icon for working images, and an amber exclamation point icon for images with load speeds longer than 6 seconds.
Choose any icon to open the Image details sidebar on the right. Or you can select the image error in the pane and your preview will jump to its location in the email, as well as open the Image details sidebar. The image is identified by its file name, followed by its hosting URL. The Destination preview presents the view a subscriber would have of the image. You’ll see your image Alt Text to enhance accessibility. The Source Line shows the exact location and code line that includes your image. The error message returned by the server is the last information section, along with a suggested step for correcting the issue. |
Monitoring history
Every monitored project retains 14 days of history so you can see changes over time. Expand any listed day to see reported impacts or select a highlighted calendar date to jump to see its report.
Alert troubleshooting
Both image and link alerts will show an error code indicating the response from the website of the link destination or where the image is hosted. The communication status codes will have a corresponding message. Numerous codes can indicate client-side errors which you can take back to your IT team or whoever manages the website where your content is hosted.
Server was too slow to respond
The request to load a web page took longer than the website's server could wait so the connection with the website "timed out." The most common cause of this error is an incorrect URL. It could also be caused by a slow connection or connectivity issues. Please make sure the URL provided is correct.
We could not complete the request
This error happens when the server detects too many attempts to access your website within a short period. This can either be due to a user trying to log in with the wrong credentials or too much traffic to your website. Whenever this situation occurs, the system will activate a rate-limiting feature, triggering an error. Rate limiting is a strategy used to limit network traffic when it detects an excess of activity. Check with your web domain hosts to see what the limits are and verify it can support the network traffic to your site.
Server encountered an error while responding
Server errors occur when something goes wrong on the server while your request is being processed. This error message can occur for a variety of reasons. Verify that the link is correct and that the server can handle incoming requests.
Server denied the request
This is an error message that might occur when a user is trying to access your website or a specific web page they don't have access to (maybe it requires a login or is behind a firewall). This message indicates that the web server the user is trying to connect to has refused the request to access. Make sure the webpage you are linking to is accessible to the intended users.
Path could not be found.
This is a common error when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link to a webpage that can't be found. Verify the link is correct.
SSL certificate error
An SSL certificate error occurs when a web browser can't verify the SSL certificate installed on a site. Rather than connect users to your website, the browser will display an error message, warning users that the site may be insecure. An SSL is a digital certificate that authenticates a website's identity and enables an encrypted connection between the user and your site. Reach out to where your domain is hosted to add a certificate to your site.
Domain name not found
When you receive this error message, the IP address that matches the website domain name you entered can not be found. There are several reasons why a DNS domain name resolution might fail. One of the more common reasons is that the DNS server is (temporarily) unavailable. Verify your hosting domain is set up properly.
Email address format not valid
The email address is not valid, please make sure the email format is correct.
Telephone format not valid
The format must start with a number or a + (to include country code). Phone numbers must only contain digits, dashes, periods, or spaces but no alphabetical characters or other punctuation like !, #, $ etc.
429 error on Instagram links
You may see a 429 too many requests error when testing Instagram links. Unfortunately, Instagram results are inconsistent due to the way Instagram may flag our activity. This sometimes leads to Instagram returning an error which is then reported in your links section.