email webhooks bounce complaint open click

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for the main email webhooks/events you mentioned:

Common email webhook events

1) Bounce

Triggered when an email can’t be delivered.

• Hard bounce: permanent failure
  Examples: invalid email address, domain doesn’t exist.
• Soft bounce: temporary failure
  Examples: mailbox full, temporary server issue.

Useful fields

• recipient email
• bounce type/status
• SMTP response
• reason/message
• timestamp
• message ID

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2) Complaint

Triggered when a recipient marks your email as spam/junk.

Useful fields

• recipient email
• complaint timestamp
• message ID
• campaign/message metadata
• feedback type, if provided

Why it matters

• High complaint rates can hurt sender reputation.
• Often used to suppress future sends to that recipient.

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3) Open

Triggered when an email is opened.

How it works

• Usually detected via a tracking pixel.
• Can be unreliable due to image blocking, privacy features, and email client behavior.

Useful fields

• recipient email
• open timestamp
• device/client info, if available
• message ID
• IP address, if allowed by provider

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4) Click

Triggered when a recipient clicks a tracked link in the email.

Useful fields

• recipient email
• clicked URL
• click timestamp
• message ID
• campaign metadata
• user agent / IP, if provided

Why it matters

• Stronger engagement signal than opens.
• Useful for conversion tracking and engagement scoring.

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Typical webhook payload shape

Most providers send something like:

{
  "event": "click",
  "timestamp": "2026-10-04T12:34:56Z",
  "message_id": "abc123",
  "recipient": "user@example.com",
  "metadata": {
    "campaign_id": "camp_001"
  }
}

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Best practices

• Deduplicate events using event ID or message ID + timestamp.
• Verify signatures on webhook requests.
• Store raw payloads for debugging/auditing.
• Suppress bounces/complaints automatically.
• Treat opens as approximate, not absolute truth.

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a sample webhook schema for bounce/complaint/open/click,
2. Node.js/Python handler examples, or
3. a comparison table of these events.