The Metrics panel on the event Communications tab gives you a real-time view of how each email send performed — from delivery through engagement. Understanding these metrics helps you improve future sends and identify deliverability issues early.
🖼️ In the Forge app: The email metrics dashboard for Planner Conference 2026 showing open rates, click rates, and deliverability status by send.
Core Delivery Metrics
| Metric | Definition | Healthy benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Sent | Total number of emails handed off to the email provider for delivery | — |
| Delivered | Emails accepted by the recipient mail server (Sent minus bounces) | > 97% of Sent |
| Delivery Rate | Delivered ÷ Sent × 100 | > 97% |
| Bounced | Emails rejected by the recipient mail server — split into Hard and Soft bounces | < 3% of Sent |
| Hard Bounce | Permanent delivery failure — invalid address, domain does not exist | < 1% — persistent hard bounces suppress future sends to that address |
| Soft Bounce | Temporary delivery failure — mailbox full, server temporarily unavailable | < 2% — Forge retries soft bounces up to 3 times |
Engagement Metrics
| Metric | Definition | Healthy benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | Number of recipients who opened the email (tracked via a 1×1 tracking pixel) | — |
| Open Rate | Opened ÷ Delivered × 100 | > 20% for event emails; 15–25% typical for B2B |
| Clicked | Number of recipients who clicked at least one link in the email (tracked via link redirects) | — |
| Click Rate | Clicked ÷ Delivered × 100 | > 3% |
| Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) | Clicked ÷ Opened × 100 — measures how relevant the content was to those who opened | > 15% |
| Unsubscribed | Recipients who clicked the unsubscribe link in this email | < 0.2% per send |
| Spam Complaints | Recipients who marked the email as spam in their mail client | < 0.08% — exceeding this can trigger provider-level sending blocks |
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), active since iOS 15 / macOS Monterey, pre-loads tracking pixels on behalf of users. This inflates open rates artificially — typical Apple Mail open rates can appear 20–30% higher than actual engagement. Use click rates as a more reliable engagement signal.
Bounce Management
Forge automatically manages bounce suppression to protect your sender reputation:
- Hard bounces permanently suppress the email address from all future sends on your account.
- Soft bounces suppress the address for 72 hours, then re-enable it for future sends.
- Manually suppressed addresses can be reviewed and removed from the suppression list in Global Options > Email > Suppression List.
- Suppressed address counts are shown per send in the Metrics panel.
Spam and Complaint Handling
When a recipient marks your email as spam, the complaint is reported to Forge via a feedback loop (FBL) from the email provider. The address is automatically added to the suppression list. If your spam rate exceeds 0.1% in a rolling window, Forge displays a deliverability warning and may temporarily throttle sends until the rate drops.
Deliverability Health Score
The Deliverability Health Score is a composite indicator shown at the top of the Communications Metrics panel. It combines your bounce rate, spam complaint rate, unsubscribe rate, and domain authentication status into a single score from 0–100. A score below 70 triggers actionable recommendations.
| Score range | Interpretation | Recommended action |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Excellent — your sending reputation is healthy | Continue current practices |
| 70–89 | Good — minor issues may be present | Review the bounce breakdown and check for hard-bounce clusters on a single domain |
| 50–69 | Fair — deliverability is at risk | Investigate spam complaints, verify domain DNS records, clean your contact list |
| 0–49 | Poor — immediate action required | Pause large sends, clean suppression list, contact your email provider to review |
Domain Authentication Status
The Metrics panel shows real-time status for the three DNS authentication records that protect your sending domain:
| Record | What it does | Status indicators |
|---|---|---|
| SPF | Authorizes Forge's sending servers to send on behalf of your domain | Valid / Missing / Invalid |
| DKIM | Cryptographically signs outgoing emails so recipients can verify they were not tampered with | Valid / Missing / Invalid |
| DMARC | Tells recipient mail servers what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM (quarantine or reject) | Valid / Missing — strongly recommended but not strictly required |
After adding or updating SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records in your DNS provider, allow up to 48 hours for global propagation before the Forge metrics panel shows a Valid status.