Understanding date fields

[alexb20110509]

Hi All,

I am trying to understand which date field relates to when an email starts to send. I always use contact date but if I understand correctly this is more when the email is scheduled to send rather than when it actually starts. 

I need to do some analysis on open/click rates for when emails are sending, and the contact date doesn't seem to be reliable for this.

For example if we have an email scheduled to go at 1pm each day, sometimes they seem to actually arrive in people inboxes at different times. So is there a way of identifying when the delivery actually starts to deliver?

Thank you!

Edit: Adobe campaign classic

[david--garcia]

You can use the @eventDate of the Recipient delivery log (nms:broadLogRcp) to estimate down to individual email records.

You can look at the following test i sent to my self and check the timeline on the timestamps

The latest event date on ACC is 02/12/2021 04:59:20 and I received the email in my inbox at Thu 02/12/2021 05:01

Looking at the email headers, it was handed over by Adobe's mail servers and received by Microsoft email servers between 04:59:20 and 05:01

Due to throlling, bottlenecks, queues, message preparation, etc, if you have 100k emails to send, they will not all be sent at exactly the same time.

Here are the columns you can perform tests on to check for timestamps

  <select>
    <node _oldExpr="@label" colSize="35" expr="@label" label="Label"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@state" colSize="18" expr="@state" label="Status"/>
    <node _oldExpr="[properties/@toDeliver]" colSize="16" expr="[properties/@toDeliver]"
          label="Messages to send"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@created" colSize="20" expr="@created" label="Creation date"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@startDate" colSize="20" expr="@startDate" label="Analysis start"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@endDate" colSize="20" expr="@endDate" label="Analysis completed"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@contentModTime" colSize="25" expr="@contentModTime" label="Content modification date"/>
    <node _oldExpr="[scheduling/@contactDate]" colSize="20" expr="[scheduling/@contactDate]"
          label="Contact date"/>
    <node _oldExpr="[execution/@broadStartDate]" colSize="20" expr="[execution/@broadStartDate]"
          label="Start date"/>
    <node _oldExpr="[execution/@broadEndDate]" colSize="20" expr="[execution/@broadEndDate]"
          label="End date"/>
    <node _oldExpr="@lastModified" colSize="20" expr="@lastModified" label="Last modified"/>
  </select>

[david--garcia]

Do you still have any unresolved queries @alexb20110509 

[alexb20110509]

Hi @david--garcia 

Thanks very much for your response, it was very helpful. We seem to have about a 3 hour delay between contactdate and the first eventdate. Once the events start sending they take about an hour to delivery (50k emails) which is fine. I am trying to understand why there is a 3 hour delay between the delivery started and the email start to be delivered. 

Does that kind of delay sound about right to you? We send multiple newsletters/marketing emails. Roughly 15million per month.

[david--garcia · Accepted solution]

I think is a bit slow, but, the best way is to engage with Adobe's deliverability team and they can definately get to the root cause and provide suggestions; if the volume of emails is too high for the current infrastructure to handle perhaps Adobe can spin up more MTA or MTA childs instances to ease the load.

Is the 3 hour delay only impacting a specific campaign? could it be that you are executing more campaigns during the same time? you could benefit from running an audit on all your campaigns to find any bottlenecks then distribute the traffic throughout the day rather than executing a lot of campaigns during the same time period.

Best contact deliverability team.