Marketing & GrowthFree
Transactional Email Audit and Owner Report
Every automated message you send, ranked by volume, with the ones the rules now treat as marketing at the top.
River's transactional email audit builds the list nobody has. Every automated message your systems send, the event that fires it, its monthly volume, the team that owns it, and the date somebody last read the copy. Each one then gets classified by what it contains rather than by what sent it, so a receipt that quietly acquired a promotional block is reported as commercial mail. You get an inventory sheet sorted by sends and a short document naming what to fix first.
Unlike a deliverability checklist, this does not open at SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Those are worth checking, and the list health and deliverability audit is where that check lives. The failure here is organisational instead: nineteen messages across four systems, each written once by whoever shipped the feature, none of them in anybody's review cycle. A checklist describes what good looks like. An inventory tells you which of your own sends is broken and how many people received it last month.
Built for lifecycle and email marketers who inherited a programme they did not build, marketing operations mapping what a replatform has to carry over, and whoever gets asked whether the receipts need an unsubscribe link. The campaign half of the programme is covered by the lifecycle email program pack and by a year of campaign sends in one table, while the marketing workspace keeps the inventory beside the sends it describes.
How a receipt turns into marketing mail
Most teams sort automated mail by the system that sends it. The campaign platform does marketing, the application does receipts, and the two get different rules. The statute sorts by content instead. It recognises five defined categories of transactional or relationship mail. They cover a transaction the recipient agreed to, warranty and safety notices, a change in an account's terms or standing, periodic statements, and delivering what was already bought. A shipping notice qualifies. A shipping notice carrying a discount code is a different question.
Mixed content is where receipts go wrong, and the rule is unusually specific. A message is transactional only where it consists exclusively of transactional content, and mixed mail is commercial if either the subject line reads promotional or the transactional part is not at the beginning of the body. Kettleby Supply, a fastener distributor, ran that test over nineteen automated messages sending 161,600 a month. Three failed: a shipping notice offering ten percent off in its subject line, plus a statement and a password reset that both opened with a product block.
Those three carry 35,600 sends a month, 22 percent of the automated volume, and none of them had an opt-out or the valid physical postal address a commercial message needs. The reputational half is quieter. Google's bulk sender rules require one-click unsubscribe on marketing and subscribed messages and report one spam rate per sending domain, so Kettleby's domain read 0.17 percent while its campaign stream alone ran at 0.47 percent. The receipts were averaging down the number that would have raised the alarm.
How it works
Name the systems
Every place that sends mail without a person pressing send, including the scripts nobody documented.
River builds the inventory
Each message with its trigger, its volume, its owner, and the date the template was last edited.
Read the classification
Which sends are legally commercial, which condition each one trips, and the fix per template.
Keep it current
Add the sends you find later, and rerun the test after the app team ships a template change.
What you get
- Every automated message across every system, with its trigger, monthly volume and named owner
- A transactional or commercial call on each one, made on content rather than on the sending system
- The mixed-content failures ordered by sends, with the specific condition each of them trips
- The messages with no owner and no edit since the last replatform, counted and dated
- Contradictions between systems, where two templates tell one customer different things about the same event
- Each stream's own complaint rate, instead of one blended figure for the whole domain
Common questions
Is a receipt with a promo block in it actually breaking a rule?
Not on its own. Mixed mail becomes commercial where the subject line reads promotional, or where the transactional content is not at the start of the body. A discount sitting below a complete receipt, under a subject line about the order, stays transactional. Move the same block above the receipt and the classification changes.
We send everything from one domain. Does that matter?
It decides whose reputation your password resets inherit. Google reports one spam rate per sending domain, so a high-complaint campaign stream and a quiet receipt stream produce a single number describing neither. The audit reports each stream's rate and volume separately, which is what you need before deciding anything about the domain itself.
Who is supposed to own a password reset email?
Whoever is accountable for what it says, which is rarely the engineer who wrote it. The audit does not assign an owner for you. It reports every message that has none, with its monthly volume and the date the template was last edited, and that pairing is usually the argument that gets one assigned.
Our app sends mail straight from code. Will you find those?
Only if something can tell you they exist. The audit works from what you can list: the sending platform's template list, the helpdesk macros, and whatever the engineering team can enumerate. Messages nobody can name get a row saying so, because a visible gap is worth more than an inventory that looks complete and is not.
Does this cover consent rules outside the US?
The classification here is the United States test, which turns on what a message contains. Consent regimes ask a different question, and the answer depends on where each recipient is rather than on the template. The inventory is the input to both, since neither question can be answered message by message without one.
How is this different from an email deliverability audit?
A deliverability audit checks authentication, reputation and list quality. This one checks the messages themselves: what exists, what fires it, who owns it, and how each one classifies. Both are worth doing, and only one of them finds a shipping notice selling something in its subject line.
Transactional Email Audit and Owner Report
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