Newsletter

Newsletter Checklist

Content

Design & Formatting

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Listmonk Settings

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Testing

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Monitor Post-Send

Amazon SES

Account dashboard

This is the AWS Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) console

Here we can find;

1. Sending Limits
2. Account Health

3. Daily Email Usage

Daily email usage helps you to monitor your daily sending statistics to ensure you aren’t approaching your sending limits. 

Metrics:

4. Sending Statistics

Reputation metrics

The Reputation metrics page gives you a look into two key metrics that Amazon SES takes into account when evaluating your sender reputation and the health of your account.

Sender Reputation

Why It Matters Practically

1. Summary

Account Status - It shows whether your account is in good standing based on how many emails bounce or get marked as spam.

There are 3 possible statuses:

Emails Sent (Last 24 Hours): How many emails you've sent today.

Remaining Sends: How many more emails you can still send today.

Sending Quota Used: The percentage of your daily email limit you've already used (e.g., 60% means you've used more than half your daily allowance).


2. Bounce rate
3. Complaint rate

How many recipients marked your email as spam. Even a small % can hurt badly

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Things to check on weekly basis:

This page is essentially the health report of your email program, ignoring it risks getting your account suspended and losing the ability to send emails entirely.

Identities

From here we can understand;

Identities Matter Because;

Suppression List

Those emails we are block listed in Listmonk will reflect here

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Actions Available;

Suppression list tab - View/manage individual suppressed addresses

Bulk actions tab - Add or remove addresses in bulk

Account-level settings

This means SES will automatically suppress (block sending to) any email address that has previously bounced or been marked as spam/complaint.

Important;

Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) Dashboard

The dashboard provides both a broad and detailed perspective on your account’s deliverability program - featuring easy-to-understand graphic cards that display deliverability and reputation through bounce/complaint statistics, as well as open/click and delivery rates. You can also dive into specific table data when there’s a problem related to a certain ISP, sending identity, or configuration set linked to an email campaign.

Date range: you can select either Relative range (default) or Absolute range for the timeframe to be used in analyzing your deliverability stats and metrics:

Key Metrics:

Metrics

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The Metrics pane shows all VDM metrics in the form of time series graphs, with Volume progression displayed on the left side and Rate progression on the right side. It has a set aggregation period of 1 day, which illustrates the progression for the date range you choose at the top of the page. You can filter the metrics you wish to view on the chart by using the Select metrics dropdown.

The individual metrics:

After each newsletter, review the metrics to see how it is engaging with our audience.

Listmonk FAQs

FAQ 01

How do I get the unsubscribed / bounced / complained people from SES and add them to Listmonk's blocklist?

SES, Listmonk, Bounces, Complaints

SES automatically maintains a Suppression List — it contains every email address that has hard-bounced or been marked as spam. You need to periodically sync this list into Listmonk's blocklist so that Listmonk also stops sending to these addresses.

Where to find the Suppression List in SES:

SES Console → Suppression List → Suppression list tab


  1. Open the Amazon SES Console and make sure you're in the correct region (Asia Pacific — Mumbai).
  2. Go to Suppression List in the left sidebar. You'll see all email addresses that SES has suppressed, along with the reason (Bounce or Complaint) and the date added.
  3. Export or note down the suppressed email addresses. You can filter by reason if you only want bounces or only complaints.
  4. In Listmonk, go to Subscribers → All Subscribers. Search for each suppressed email, select it, and mark it as Blocklisted. For bulk actions, you can use Listmonk's import feature with the blocklist flag set to true.
  5. After blocklisting in Listmonk, optionally remove the address from SES's suppression list only if you've confirmed the address is now in Listmonk's blocklist — this avoids double-handling next time.
💡 Recommended cadence: Check the SES Suppression List at least once a week (ideally after every major campaign) and sync new entries to Listmonk's blocklist. This keeps your bounce rate low and prevents your SES account from being flagged.

⚠️ Why this matters: SES stops sending to suppressed addresses automatically, but Listmonk doesn't know about it. If you don't sync, Listmonk will keep queueing emails to these addresses, wasting your daily sending quota and causing delivery errors in your campaign reports.
FAQ 02

How do I identify the truly active subscribers of my newsletter?

Listmonk, SQL Query

For us, an "active subscriber" is someone who has received at least 9–10 newsletters/campaigns and has opened at least one of them (i.e., open rate > 0%). This filters out both new subscribers who haven't had enough exposure and long-time subscribers who never engage.

Conversely, to find inactive subscribers — people who received enough campaigns but never opened a single one — use the query below in Listmonk's subscriber search:

Listmonk → Subscribers → Query Subscribers → Advanced
Listmonk SQL — Inactive Subscribers

-- Subscribers who received ≥ 9 campaigns but opened ZERO
EXISTS(
  SELECT 1
    FROM campaign_lists cl
    INNER JOIN subscriber_lists sl
      ON cl.list_id = sl.list_id
    WHERE sl.subscriber_id = subscribers.id
    GROUP BY sl.subscriber_id
    HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT cl.campaign_id) >= 9
)
AND NOT EXISTS(
  SELECT 1
    FROM campaign_views cv
    WHERE cv.subscriber_id = subscribers.id
)

What this query does:

  1. The first EXISTS block finds subscribers who belong to lists that have been targeted by at least 9 distinct campaigns — meaning they've had enough exposure to your content.
  2. The AND NOT EXISTS block filters to only those who have zero entries in the campaign_views table — meaning they never opened a single email.
  3. The result is your inactive segment: people who've had plenty of chances to engage but haven't. You can then decide whether to re-engage them with a special campaign or blocklist them.
💡 To find active subscribers instead, flip the second condition: change AND NOT EXISTS to AND EXISTS. This gives you everyone who received ≥ 9 campaigns and opened at least one.

📊 Recommended cadence: Run this query monthly. Use the inactive list to run a re-engagement campaign ("We miss you!"). If they still don't open after 2–3 re-engagement attempts, consider blocklisting to improve your overall open rates and SES reputation.
FAQ 03

What are safe bounce and complaint rate thresholds, and where do I check them?

SES, Bounces, Complaints

Your bounce and complaint rates directly determine your SES account health. If they go too high, AWS will put your account under review or suspend it entirely.

Where to check:

SES Console → Reputation metrics → Summary


Metric Safe Warning Dangerous
Bounce rate Below 2% 2% – 5% Above 5%
Complaint rate Below 0.08% 0.08% – 0.1% Above 0.1%
Account status Healthy Under Review At Risk
⚠️ Key point: The "historic bounce rate" shown in SES is calculated over a representative volume — it's your account's long-term health indicator, not a real-time number. Check it at least weekly, and always after large campaign sends.
FAQ 04

How do I check how many emails I've sent today and how many I have left?

SES

The SES account dashboard shows your daily sending usage at a glance.

SES Console → Account dashboard → Daily email usage

You'll see three numbers:

  1. Emails sent — how many you've sent in the current 24-hour window.
  2. Remaining sends — how many more you can send before hitting the daily quota.
  3. Sending quota used — percentage of daily limit consumed.

Our current limits: 80,000 emails per 24 hours with a maximum send rate of 14 emails per second. If you're approaching the limit before a large campaign, request a limit increase through the SES console.

💡 Tip: Always check this before scheduling a large campaign in Listmonk. If your remaining quota is less than your subscriber count, the campaign will partially fail silently.
FAQ 05

What should I review in SES after every campaign send?

SES, Listmonk

After each newsletter or campaign, do a quick post-send review using these SES sections:

  1. Sending Statistics — Check the charts for the last 1 day. Look at successful sends, rejections, bounces, and complaints. If bounces or complaints spike, investigate immediately.
  2. Reputation Metrics — Confirm account status is still Healthy. Check that bounce rate and complaint rate haven't crossed into warning thresholds.
  3. Suppression List — Check for newly added addresses. Sync any new entries into Listmonk's blocklist (see FAQ 01).
  4. VDM Dashboard — Review open rate and click rate for the campaign period. Compare against your baseline to see if engagement is trending up or down.
📊 Pro tip: Use the "View in CloudWatch" buttons on the sending statistics charts to set up alarms for bounce/complaint rate spikes. This way you get notified automatically instead of checking manually.
FAQ 06

How do I find out which emails permanently bounced so I can clean my list?

SES, Listmonk, Bounces

There are two types of bounces in SES:

  1. Permanent bounces — Invalid or non-existent email addresses. These will never succeed and should be removed from your list immediately. They show up in the SES Suppression List with reason "Bounce".
  2. Transient bounces — Temporary failures (full mailbox, server down). These may succeed on retry and don't necessarily need removal.

To clean your list:

  1. Go to the SES Suppression List and filter by reason = Bounce.
  2. Export or note the permanently bounced addresses.
  3. In Listmonk, blocklist these subscribers to prevent future sends.

You can also check the VDM dashboard's Metrics pane — look at the Permanent bounces line in the time-series graph for date ranges around your campaign sends.


FAQ 07

How do I check if my sending domain/identity is still verified and healthy?

SES

You can only send emails from verified identities. If verification lapses or DNS records change, your sends will fail.

SES Console → Identities

  1. Open the Identities page and confirm that your domain (e.g., emails.tinybridge.org) shows a Verified status.
  2. If any identity shows Unverified, you cannot send from it. Re-verify by updating DNS records as prompted by SES.
  3. A domain-level identity covers all email addresses under that domain — it's more robust than verifying individual email addresses.
💡 Check this when: You notice unexpected delivery failures in Listmonk, you've recently changed DNS records, or as part of your monthly infrastructure review.
FAQ 08

What does the Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) dashboard tell me and when should I use it?

SES

The VDM dashboard is your high-level view of how well your emails are actually performing — not just whether they were sent, but whether they were delivered, opened, and clicked.

SES Console → Virtual Deliverability Manager → Dashboard

Key metrics to focus on:

  1. Total Send Volume — Your baseline. Track weekly to spot unexpected drops or spikes.
  2. Delivered rate — Emails accepted by the recipient's mail server. Should be consistently high. A drop here means delivery issues.
  3. Open Rate — Percentage of delivered emails that were opened (tracked via a tiny invisible pixel). This tells you if your subject lines and content are working.
  4. Click Rate — Of those who opened, how many clicked a link. This is your engagement quality metric.
  5. Complaints vs. Transient vs. Permanent bounces — Time-series graphs let you spot trends. Use the "Select metrics" dropdown to toggle these on/off.

Use the Date range selector (Relative or Absolute) to compare different campaign periods. The Metrics pane shows daily-aggregated time-series graphs with volume on the left axis and rates on the right.

📊 When to use VDM: After every campaign for a quick health check, and weekly for trend analysis. If you notice open rates declining over time, it may be time to run the active subscriber query (FAQ 02) and clean your list.

Last updated April 13 2026

Credits: Greeshma for the docs