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Tracking guest & crew emails

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Tracking guest & crew emails

When you send a guest an RSVP invite or hand a crew member their share link, the next thing on your mind is usually "did they actually get it?" 1pm answers that question for you. Every invite-style email 1pm sends on your behalf is tracked end to end: the delivery confirmation that comes back from the email provider, any bounce or spam report, the lot. You can see the answer in two places: live on the run of show as the email goes out, and in a full history on the contact itself.

Where the tracking lives

On a contact's edit form (open Contacts, click any row), there's a tab strip across the top: Details, Events, and now Emails. The count badge on the Emails tab tells you at a glance how many tracked emails 1pm has sent to that person across every event you've put them on. Click in for the full list, sorted newest first, with a Load more button at the bottom once you scroll past the first 25.

Each row shows when it was sent, the subject line, which kind of email it was (RSVP invite, share link, upload rejection), and a coloured status badge with the latest known delivery state. The contact's event for that send is linked underneath the subject so you can jump straight back to the run sheet that triggered the email.

What counts as a tracked email

Three categories of email show up here, all of them sent by you (or one of your handlers in the app):

  • The share-link email. Sent when you hit "Email link" on a crew row. Contains the unique, tokenised URL the crew member uses to open their run of show. When you have RSVP turned on for the event, this same email carries the RSVP callout, so it doubles as the invite.
  • The RSVP invite. Sent from the Send invite button inside a crew row's RSVP panel. Used when you want to ask for an RSVP without (or before) sharing the run of show.
  • The upload rejection. Sent when you reject a file a crew member submitted to a request, asking them to re-submit with a note about why. Less common, but tracked the same way.

Other emails 1pm sends (password resets, email verification, support replies, account notifications) aren't tracked in this view. They're system messages that don't need a venue-facing audit trail; see "The emails 1pm sends" for the full catalogue.

What each status means

The colour-coded badge tells you exactly where the email is in its journey:

sent (grey). 1pm has handed the email to the sending provider and is waiting for delivery confirmation. Usually visible for only a few seconds before the next status arrives. If a send stays "sent" for more than a minute or two, the provider is probably still working on it; give it another few minutes.

delivered (green). The recipient's mail server accepted the message. This is the high-water mark you should expect to see for almost every send to a healthy address.

delivery delayed (yellow/amber). The recipient's mail server returned a temporary failure (mailbox full, server busy, greylisting). The sending provider will keep retrying for up to 72 hours; most delayed messages eventually flip to delivered without anyone doing anything.

bounced (red). The address rejected the message permanently. Hover the badge for the reason the recipient's server gave back. The two most common causes are a mistyped address and a mailbox that no longer exists. Once an address bounces, 1pm refuses to send to it again until you fix the spelling on the contact (see below).

spam reported (red). The recipient marked the email as spam. Rare from invited crew, more common if you've imported a long list of guests who don't recognise your sender domain. 1pm will also refuse to send to a complained address again.

failed (red). The sending provider couldn't deliver the message at all, usually because of a malformed address (missing @ or domain) or an outage on the provider's side. Re-sending after fixing the address usually clears it.

The live "delivered" badge on the run of show

You don't need to open the Emails tab to see whether your latest invite landed. The crew row inside the planner shows the same status next to the "Invited at..." timestamp, and it updates live. Send an invite, watch the badge briefly say "sent", and within a few seconds you'll see it flip to "delivered" without refreshing the page. If the address is bad, you'll see "bounced" appear just as fast, with the upstream reason on hover.

This live update is driven by the same realtime channel that keeps your run sheet in sync across browser tabs. Anyone else on the same event sees the badge change at the same time you do.

What to do when a guest's email bounces

The most common cause is a typo. Open the contact, fix the spelling, save. Once 1pm sees the corrected address it will let you send again. (1pm keeps a list of addresses it's seen bounce so it doesn't keep emailing what is plainly broken, but the list is per-address, so a correction is enough to clear the block.)

If the address looks correct but bounces persistently, the recipient's mailbox almost certainly no longer exists. Ask the guest for a current email another way (call, text, ask the host), update the contact, and resend.

For "delivery delayed" you don't need to do anything; check back in an hour or two. If it's still delayed after 72 hours it will flip to failed and you can resend.

Privacy: what 1pm does and doesn't track

1pm only tracks the delivery state: whether the email got into the recipient's mailbox. We deliberately do not track whether the recipient opened the email or clicked any of its links. The tracking pixel that some marketing tools embed in every email isn't in ours, and links in your run of show emails are the real URLs, not redirects through a tracking domain.

This is a deliberate call. Open tracking is noisy (Apple Mail and many corporate environments pre-fetch images and falsely register as "opened" on every send), and click tracking would rewrite every link in every email through a third-party redirector that isn't worth the privacy trade. Delivered is the signal that genuinely matters for the question venues are asking, and it's the one we keep.

Filtering and finding things

The Emails tab is paginated newest-first with a Load more button at the bottom of the list once there are more than 25 entries. For a specific email, the subject and the linked event name underneath are usually enough to spot the right row. If you need to dig deeper across multiple contacts, the planner-side crew accordion is the better entry point: each crew row shows its own most recent invite status without you needing to bounce around between contacts.

One thing the Emails tab won't tell you

Because tracking is per-message, an email that bounces because the recipient's domain has banned 1pm (as opposed to a per-address rejection) will show as "bounced" on the row but no different from a typo bounce. If multiple unrelated recipients in the same company all bounce on the same day, that's usually the cause. Get in touch via [email protected] and we'll help you work out whether it's an IT block on their end that needs whitelisting.