• Why Email Authentication Is Important: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
• How to add a domain and get the required DNS records in UniOne
• Entering DNS records using Godaddy.com hosting as an example

Why Email Authentication Is Important: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Email authentication is an important security mechanism for your domain. It helps email services distinguish legitimate emails from spam and phishing attacks. This significantly reduces the likelihood that your emails will end up in the spam folder, increasing your inbox delivery rate. In UniOne, setting up DNS records for email authentication of the sender’s domain is mandatory for getting started.

SPF is a protocol that determines which servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. When an email is sent, the recipient's mail server checks whether the IP address of the sending server matches the list specified in the SPF record for your domain. If the IP address does not match, the email may be marked as spam or even rejected.

DKIM is an authentication method that uses a cryptographic signature to confirm the authenticity of the email being sent. When you send an email, it is automatically signed with your domain's private key. The recipient's mail server verifies this signature with the public key stored in your domain's DNS. If the signature matches, the email is considered authentic.

DMARC is a policy that allows the domain owner to define how emails that fail SPF and DKIM checks should be handled. It also provides reports on how such emails are processed, which helps improve the domain's protection against unauthorized use.

How to add a domain and get the required DNS records in UniOne

Go to the Settings – Sending domains page and add a new domain by clicking the plus button next to the page title.

A window will open where you enter your sending domain name, and also a third-level domain that will be used to track email reads and clicks on links (for the domain example.com, you can specify send.example.com or link.example.com). Click Save.

After adding a domain, you’ll see several DNS records that you will need to register in the DNS zone of your domain. If necessary, you can view these records anytime by clicking on the settings icon alongside the necessary domain in the list.

Entering DNS records using Godaddy.com hosting as an example

We will be adding records using godaddy.com hosting service as an example. Yours will probably be different, but the interface will look very similar. For each DNS record you are creating or altering, you’ll need to specify its name, record type and value, as described below.

SPF record

Before adding an SPF record, check if you have previously added a v=spf1 record for this domain. If so, you need to combine it with the new one by including all the servers in one line. For example, if you already have a value v=spf1 include:godaddy.com ~all, and now you’re adding spf.unione.io,.the resulting value will look like v=spf1 include:godaddy.com include:spf.unione.io ~all.

If there is no existing v=spf1 record, just add a new line for the domain @ TXT v=spf1 include:spf.unione.io ~all, where:

• @ is the record name. Note that some providers do not support @ and instead of this abbreviation you’ll need to specify your full domain name.
• TXT is the record type.
• v=spf1 include:spf.unione.io ~all is the record value.

DKIM record

To configure DKIM, in the name field, specify us._domainkey, and in the data field insert the long string obtained earlier (it looks like v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). The record type is TXT, as in the previous one.

verification-record

To make sure that the domain belongs to you and you are allowed to send emails from any address on this domain, you need to add the verification record. It is a record with the TXT type and the @ name. 

DMARC record

DMARC will protect your addressees from unauthorized emails pretending to come from your domain for which SPF and DKIM checks do not match.

Example of a DMARC record value: v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:your@email.com., where p prescribes the action to be taken:

• p=none — do not take action (this may be used temporarily when you reconfigure your system),
• p=quarantine — mark an offending email as spam,
• p=reject — reject an email.

If you already have a DMARC record for your domain, you can leave it as is. If you do not have one, create a new record as shown below, with CNAME for type, _dmarc for name and example.com.dmarc.unione.io. for value, thereby delegating DMARC management to us.

NS record

And the last records, with the NS type, are necessary for setting up the link tracking domain. For more information on link tracking, see our article.

Some hostings may not allow you to enter records with the NS type, in which case you’ll need to contact your hosting’s tech support. 

After adding all the records, it will take some time for the DNS zone to update. Usually it takes from 30 minutes to several hours. By clicking Check on your UniOne account’s Sending domains page in the corresponding domain line, you will see the current status of the domain setup. Green check marks will appear when the process is completed.

Happy mailing!

In the Campaigns tab, you’ll see campaign statistics for emails grouped by the same sender address and subject, or the same campaign_id value in the API calls. These reports, unlike other data, are kept for a much longer period, up to 400 days. Also you’ll see the heat map for each campaign which helps you determine which parts of your message are most efficient.

Campaign report

The screenshot below shows an example report that you’ll see after enabling campaign data collection. It includes campaign ID, email subject, sending date, number of emails sent and delivered, opens, clicks (with a breakdown by each unique link), delivery errors and unsubscribes.

With the heat map option enabled, you will also see visualization of clicks in the email. Please note that the heat map does not display a unique visitor count, but the absolute number of clicks. Thus, if one recipient clicks on a link 10 times, the heat map will show 10 more clicks.

How to enable campaign data collection

For privacy reasons, campaign information is disabled by default for all users and projects, but you can activate it in the “Statistics – Campaigns” section. The system will prompt you to select the period for storing your campaign data.

Two options are available, 45 and 400 days, which correspond to the time required to generate monthly and annual reports, respectively. You can evaluate the effectiveness of your mailings on a monthly basis or check how this year’s Black Friday campaign worked compared to last year.

A separate option must be enabled to allow saving a sample letter for each campaign, which is necessary to visualize the heat map. Leaving the checkbox empty will enable campaign statistics only, without saving letter samples.

Creating campaign IDs

To logically group your individual emails into one campaign, we use a campaign ID – a non-negative decimal integer or UUID up to 128 bits, provided as part of the metadata in the field named campaign_id. If the campaign_id parameter is omitted, the system will automatically generate a campaign_id, combining emails with the same subject and sender, sent during the same day according to UTC to 2 and more senders in one request. Please note that the number of saved campaigns per day is limited to a maximum of 1000. You may encounter this limitation if you send personalized emails, with different subject lines for each one. In this case, it is recommended to explicitly pass the campaign_id parameter so that we can correctly combine different letters into one campaign. Another advantage of using campaign_id is that it can be used as a filter for grouping emails when calling event-dump/create or generating graphical statistics charts.

If you send both marketing campaigns and transactional letters and would prefer to exclude the latter from your report, specify a 0 (zero) value for your campaign_id when sending transactional emails, and they will not be included in the report. If, for some reason, you have disabled event storage, campaign statistics will not be collected.

At times, you may need to send an email to several addresses at once, so that each addressee could see other recipients in To: or CC: fields. Or, alternatively, you may want to send someone a “blind copy”, or BCC. Here, we’ll show you how this can be accomplished.

Sending copies via Web API

Sending copies differs from regular sending in that the email parameter indicates the primary recipient, while the "To:" and "CC:" headers contain other addresses. For this, we need to specify the necessary headers "To:" and "CC:" in the headers parameter. UniOne sends these headers "as is", without changing anything about them (only MIME encoding them if necessary).

Let's consider a simple example when you need to send a letter to John at user@example.com along with a copy to Mary at cc@example.org. this case, the recipients and headers parameters of the email/send method should be as follows:

  "recipients": [
    {"email":"user@example.com"},
    {"email":"сс@example.org"}
  ],
  "headers": {
    "To": "John <user@example.com>",
    "CC": "Mary <cc@example.org>"
  }

Here's a more complex example. We send a letter to Miguel and José, with copies to Helen and Habib, plus a blind copy to bcc@example.net:

  "recipients": [
    {"email":"to_user1@example.com"},
    {"email":"to_user2@example.com"},
    {"email":"copy1@example.org"},
    {"email":"copy2@example.org"},
    {"email":"bcc@example.net"}
  ],
  "headers": {
    "To": "Miguel <to_user1@example.com>, José <to_user2@example.com>",
    "CC": "Helen <copy1@example.org>, Habib <copy2@example.org>"
  }

Please note the following:

• The names for "To" and "CC" addresses in the headers can be sent “as is”, without MIME encoding of any international characters.
• It is important to keep in mind that substitutions in a letter can be different for each recipient. If you want all addressees to receive the same text, either use the same substitutions for each one, or use the global_substitutions parameter instead of personal substitutions.
• Links for tracking email opens and clicks, as well as the unsubscribe link, will always be unique for each recipient.
• Your account will be charged for each email specified in the recipients array.

There are several restrictions when sending copies with UniOne:

• You cannot specify a "CC" header without a "To" header – this will result in a sending error. The “To” header without “CC” is allowed.
• The number of addresses in the "To" header is limited to ten; the same restriction applies to the "CC" header. There can also be a maximum of ten blind copies.
• If the address from the email parameter is not listed as either “To” or “CC” (i.e., it is used to create a blind copy), then this address can only be on your own domain already verified in UniOne. You cannot send blind copies to domains other than those you own. Unfortunately, we have to enforce this rule to prevent email phishing.

Sending copies via SMTP API

By default, when sending via SMTP, UniOne does not strictly adhere to the RFC specifications. Instead, it sends each recipient from the “To” and “CC” headers their own copy of the letter with a single email address in the final “To” header, which matches the real address of the recipient.

If you need strict compliance with the SMTP standard, i.e. emails being sent without changing the To: and CC: MIME headers (for example, to send regular and blind copies with CC and BCC), you must enable strict mode by setting the strict parameter to true in the X-UNIONE header, or contact technical support to enable strict=true for all your emails without having to pass an additional parameter in the header.

Unlike the email/send Web API call, when sending via SMTP, you are responsible for the correct MIME encoding of the headers. By default, you’ll be charged for each address in the To or CC header; in strict mode – for each recipient in the RCPT TO.

Strict mode limitations are similar to those listed for the Web API above:

• You cannot specify a "CC" header without a "To" header – this will result in a sending error. The “To” header without “CC” is allowed.
• The number of addresses in the "To" header is limited to ten; the same restriction applies to the "CC" header. There can also be a maximum of ten blind copies.
• If the address from the email parameter is not listed as either “To” or “CC” (i.e., it is used to create a blind copy), then this address can only be on your own domain already verified in UniOne. You cannot send blind copies to domains other than those you own. Unfortunately, we have to enforce this rule to prevent email phishing.

In the world of email marketing, the delivery of messages via email is one of the key aspects. However, even the highest-quality mailing list can encounter delivery problems if it contains unreachable email addresses. In this article, we’ll see how email address validation can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns and take a look at UniOne’s validation methods and proper ways to use this functionality.

What is email validation

Email address validation is the process of checking email addresses for correct syntax and functionality. The purpose of this process is to get rid of addresses that are either invalid or could negatively impact the sender's reputation. Through validation, you can ensure that recipients' addresses actually exist and are capable of receiving messages.

Why validation is necessary

Maintaining a high level of deliverability enhances the sender's domain reputation. This, in turn, significantly reduces the likelihood of your emails ending up in spam or being blocked. Additionally, in mailing services, pricing is usually based on the number of emails sent – by sending messages to invalid addresses, you are just wasting your money.

When should you use email validation

If your subscription forms use single opt-in, i.e., subscription without confirmation, you’ll inevitably get a certain number of invalid email addresses. A user may make a typo, enter a one-time disposable address or even someone else's email. To avoid such cases, it's better to use a double opt-in procedure with confirmation. If, for some reason, this is not possible, consider integrating the email validation process into the registration form of your website. This way, you’ll be able to instantly inform users that the address they entered is invalid or unreachable.

Another common scenario is when a mailing list has not been used for mailing for a long time. Address owners may have deleted their mail or forgotten about you. Such a base needs to be checked for relevance, otherwise mailing services may block you due to a large number of returns, unsubscribes, and spam complaints.

Contact collection at offline events or through paper surveys may also lead to problems due to customer errors in addresses, illegible handwriting, or poor data collection organization. In this case, validation will also be extremely useful.

How address validation works

In response to the email-validation/single method call, you will receive: the status of the checked address; the reason it was set; the probability of using the address for mailings; and several other fields with useful information. You can read more about this in our documentation.

Since the email-validation/single method is intended for single checks, it has certain limitations. A maximum of two simultaneous requests are allowed, and if exceeded, an error will be returned. The check must be quick, so we limit the checking time: if a recipient’s mail server does not respond in 5 seconds, the validation result may be undefined.

Email address validation is an important way to improve deliverability and enhance the sender's reputation. By using UniOne’s validation, you can ensure the high efficiency of your email campaigns.

Projects offer you a way to completely isolate data for different independent domains, unreachable address lists, templates, mailing settings etc.

Let’s consider a few possible scenarios for projects:

• You offer UniOne-based email marketing services to different clients or use UniOne as a white label solution as part of your infrastructure. To keep your clients’ data separate from one another, you may create a separate project for each client.
• You have multiple departments, each one with its own web sites and mailing lists, and your employees should be able to access only the data that is related to their department’s resources. A practical solution would include creating a separate project for each department and using Shared access to manage individual access rights.
• You send email campaigns across markets in different countries, each with its dedicated sender domains, dedicated IPs and other custom settings. Again, projects would be an ideal solution in this case.

While keeping your projects entirely isolated, you may still manage them and make payments using your primary UniOne account. This would allow you to use the most cost effective tariff, based on the combined volume of emails across all of your projects.

Each project has its own API key, and API calls with a particular key will affect only data related to that project. This way you may be sure that the projects are entirely independent: for instance, if an addressee unsubscribes from any of your projects, it will not affect their subscription to the other ones.

You may manage your projects and create new ones either via Settings/Projects page in your account or by using project-related API calls. By default, access to this page and methods is disabled for security reasons. To enable projects functionality, please contact our support team.

While setting up your projects, keep in mind the following:

• For maximum project independence, a sender domain is verified and enabled separately for the main account and for any of the projects using it. If you’d like to let all your projects use verified domains from your main account, please send a request to our support team.
• You can limit users’ (your clients or employees) access to statistics, templates and other data by specifying a list of projects available to them. This is done by selecting the projects you need in the Shared access  menu.

• What are suppression lists and what are they used for
• How does an email address become suppressed
• Types of suppression lists in UniOne
• How suppression lists improve your deliverability
• Managing suppression lists

What are suppression lists and what are they used for

Suppression lists, or lists of unreachable addresses, serve as a means of maintaining your sender reputation and nurturing your subscribers. By using them, you suppress messages to certain addresses which, if sent, would be likely to do you harm. Our service will automatically filter out the email addresses found in these lists.

An email address may be suppressed for a variety of reasons. It may be syntactically invalid; the mailbox owner may unsubscribe from your mailings or issue a complaint; or the receiving server may be known to block certain types of emails it deems unwanted.

How does an email address become suppressed

Generally, there are three entities that may be the source of information used to render an address as suppressed:

• The system: an address may be considered unreachable when a large number of delivery attempts fail. Other possible reasons include the address being registered as a spam trap.
• The owner: your subscriber may cancel their subscription or issue a complaint.
• The client: you may opt to add an address to a list with an appropriate status – unsubscribed, complainer, etc.

The particular source is returned as a value of the source field when calling the suppression/get API method. This method also provides the related cause – user complaint, unsubscription, delivery issues, etc.

Types of suppression lists in UniOne

There are two types of suppression lists in UniOne:

1. The global suppression list – addresses that are considered unreachable for all users. The only sources here are the system and the address owner, but never any of our clients.
2. The local suppression list contains addresses that are suppressed for your mailings only, based on previous sending attempts or the owner’s actions.

The global suppression list is a major benefit as it suppresses any mailings to addresses that are already known to be unreachable and thus helps you maintain a good deliverability score and solid sender reputation.

How suppression lists improve your deliverability

Let’s consider the following three scenarios.

Sending out marketing emails

Mass marketing emails are more likely to be considered as spam by mailbox providers, thus the primary goal is to avoid sending emails to unreachable addresses and keep the number of complaints to a minimum. It makes perfect sense to use our prior knowledge about the addresses that cannot be reached or whose owners tend to place complaints. As such, both local and global suppression lists are used for this type of email, which helps you achieve a good sender reputation and keep the number of complaints to a minimum, which in turn will improve your deliverability rate.

The default parameters for the email/send API method are optimized for this type of email.

Sending regular transactional messages

Abandoned cart emails, balance notifications, billing reminders and the like are anticipated by the recipient, so complaints are far less likely. In this case, it would be reasonable to turn off the global suppression list and use only the local one.

To use this scenario, set the bypass_global parameter value to 1 when calling the email/send

Sending high priority transactional messages

This category includes emails that need to be delivered even at the risk of degrading your sender reputation, e. g. account confirmations, password resets or security notifications. It would make sense to skip checks for both the global and local suppression lists. However, it is advised to consider possible cases where the local list needs to be used partially, for example, to suppress letters to known complainers.

In order to send high priority letters to addresses known to be unreachable, specify bypass_global=1 and bypass_unavailable=1. If you also need to contact unsubscribed addresses, add bypass_unsubscribed=1. Similarly, with bypass_complained=1 emails will be sent to complainers as well.

Managing suppression lists

To view, add or remove addresses from suppression lists, our Web API offers a set of suppression methods. For individual addresses, you may also use the Tools/Email search page in your account.<

You may remove addresses from your local suppression list whenever you like, however removal from global lists is limited to a few addresses per day and may not be available for certain addresses.

If you implement your own unsubscribing mechanism, we strongly recommend adding unsubscribed addresses to the UniOne suppression list as well, using suppression/set API method – this will help us to ensure that no emails are sent to anyone who has canceled their subscription. This is especially useful if your messages originate from several sources, and lists of unsubscribed addresses for different types of mailings are maintained separately.

While viewing statistics, setting up webhooks, and processing delivery results you will encounter various email delivery statuses. This article provides a detailed specification of such statuses and how they should be processed.

Standard statuses

At the most basic level, there are eight standard email statuses. These statuses are returned via webhooks or downloaded using the event-dump/* methods. The status field can have one of the following values:

• sent — the email has been successfully checked and put in the queue for sending. At this stage we do not know yet whether it was delivered or not.
• delivered — the email has been successfully accepted by the recipient’s mail server. Later this status may change to “opened”, “clicked”, “unsubscribed”, or “spam”.
• opened — the email has been delivered and read by the recipient. The status may still change to “clicked”, “unsubscribed”, or “spam”. To enable read tracking, you must specify track_read=1 while sending.
• clicked — the email has been delivered and read, and the recipient has clicked on one of the links in the message. The status may change to “unsubscribed” or “spam”. To enable click tracking, you must specify track_links=1 in the email/send parameters.
• unsubscribed — the email has been delivered and read, and the recipient has opted to unsubscribe using the unsubscribe link included in the message or specified in the List-Unsubscribe email header. This status is final.
• soft_bounced — a transient error has occurred while trying to deliver the message. UniOne will take additional delivery attempts for a period of 48 hours, starting from the first attempt. In case of success, the status will be changed to “delivered”, otherwise it will be “hard_bounced”.
• hard_bounced - delivery attempts failed, there will be no further attempts to deliver the particular message. The status is final. This may occur due to different reasons; extended status information is provided in delivery_info.delivery_status, described below. The full SMTP server response is also available for analysis as delivery_info.destination_response value. A few common reasons are: the target address is not available; the message has been rejected as spam; the destination mailbox has no free space left.
• spam — the message has been successfully delivered and manually marked as spam by the addressee. This status is final. The information is only available for domains supporting FBL technology, e.g. msn.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, ukr.net, yahoo.com, aol.com.

Extended statuses

If you set the value of delivery_info to 1 while creating a webhook, an extended delivery status will be added to the event data. The extended status is also available in the CSV data obtained with event-dump/* methods. We use these extended statuses to provide detailed delivery information in the statistical reports

Extended statuses are determined by analyzing the SMTP server responses. Oftentimes the error code or even the full error message is not sufficient here, because different servers and mailbox providers tend to use them somewhat inconsistently. Also, as mailbox providers evolve, existing messages may take on different meanings and new ones may be added. Therefore we do not provide an exhaustive list of extended statuses, and we cannot guarantee that the list will not be changed in the future; however, the semantics of existing statuses will remain unchanged.

Extended statuses are not available for all events. If the value is missing, you are best advised to be guided by the standard statuses described above.

Below is a list of extended statuses, grouped by alleged system action.

Reasons to block sending

In certain cases, UniOne does not allow a particular email to be sent (for example, an addressee has unsubscribed from your messages). The email/send call will return the reason for blocking. The reason may also be obtained using the API methods for suppressed addresses, suppression/get and suppression/list.

A reason for blocking is not the same thing as a delivery status, but as they are logically interconnected, we find it convenient to give a description here.

The reasons for blocking may be as follows:

To register subscribers’ clicks, all links in your emails are replaced with links to a dedicated link tracking domain. When a link is clicked, the click is registered, and then the reader is redirected to an original target page. UniOne allows you to use your own domains for link tracking, which increases the credibility of your messages as unfamiliar domain names do not show up in the email.

How to add your own tracking domain

To add a new domain, go to the Settings – Tracking domains page and click the plus icon alongside the page title.

The domain name you enter will be used for link tracking. We recommend using a third level domain, preferably a subdomain of your brand’s primary domain. For instance, for example.com you may use names like send.example.com or link.example.com. If you use projects, you’ll also be able to specify projects for this domain. When ready, click “Save”.

The domain’s status will be “Awaiting DNS setup”, and you’ll need to add a few DNS records for your domain (this is done in your domain’s registrar control panel). To view and copy the required records, click the gear icon.

After the records are added, you’ll need to wait until they propagate and are updated in our system. The time it takes varies from a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on your provider’s settings. If everything’s ok, the domain status will change to “Setup in progress”.

In the following 48 hours, our specialists will perform the required system setup, and the status will change to “Ready”. The domain may now be activated and, if necessary, set as default by clicking the star icon. If you’ve set up multiple tracking domains, specify the “custom_backend_id” value in email/send API call to use a particular one.

If the status changes to “Error”, contact our support team to find out what’s wrong and be advised on possible fixes.

To delete a domain you no longer need, click the cross-out icon on the right. If the domain was previously set as default, a system domain will be used instead.

General information

Dedicated IP addresses allow you to build your own reputation scores for your campaigns, totally independent from other clients who use our common pool of IPs. This strategy offers substantial deliverability benefits; on the other hand, it also requires some time to implement, since your new IPs must be “warmed up” before full-scale usage, in order to minimize the risks of blocking or ending up in spam. Mailbox providers are suspicious about large volumes of emails coming from new IPs or domains, so the number of messages sent from a new address should be increased gradually. This procedure is called “IP warmup”.

Initial setup

1. First of all, you will need to calculate the number of IPs you’ll need, based on your current infrastructure and sending volumes. Prepare a list of sending domains which you want to use with dedicated IPs. If you need to use separate IP addresses for different domains, please make sure that you’ve created special projects for each of these domains.

2. The required number of IPs for each domain or project is defined by the number of messages you’re intending to send. Currently we guarantee no less than 70 000 messages per hour from each fully warmed-up IP (the amount may actually vary from 70K to 100K, depending on the overall load and distribution of target domains). You can use this general formula for a quick estimate of the number of IPs you’ll need:
   number_of_IPs = emails_per_day / 85000, rounded upwards
   So, to send out, say, 10 million emails per month, or 333 000 messages per day you’ll need four dedicated IPs (333 000 / 85 000 = 3.9).
   * Based on the contents of your campaigns, our specialists may advise you to order one or more extra IPs, in order to mitigate any delivery issues. Our anti-spam service is constantly keeping track of deliverability issues for all our users’ campaigns and will provide additional data on the number of IPs needed with regard to most recent anti-spam trends and any particulars of your individual case.

3. Open the Settings – Dedicated IPs page in your account and click the plus icon. 

    

    

   

   Enter a third level domain name which will serve as an IP pool name and tracking domain (for example.com, it may be something like send.example.org). Specify the number of IPs you need and click Save.

4. After saving, our account will be charged for the amount of $20 for each dedicated IP (a one-time setup fee) plus IP rent according to the formula: $40 divided by 30 and multiplied by the number of days left in the current accounting period. Afterwards, the monthly service fee for your dedicated IPs will be charged together with your regular payment.

   (For custom contracts, the payment is carried out according to the contract’s terms.)

5. On the Settings – Dedicated IPs page, click the gear icon alongside your domain name. You’ll see a few DNS records that you will need to add in your domain registrar’s management console. Initially the domain status will be “Awaiting DNS setup”.

   

6. As soon as the new records are updated in our system (it usually takes up to two hours, depending on your provider’s settings), the domain status will change to “Domain setup in progress”.

7. During the next 48 hours our specialists will perform the necessary setup, and the status will change to “Active”. Now your domain is ready for use, you may activate it and designate it as a default domain. If you’ve set up more than one domain and need to specify the one to be used while sending a particular letter, specify the corresponding custom_backend_id value while calling email/send. The values can be found on the same page, in the Backend ID column.

8. If they do not show up after two days, please ask our support to check the issue. Our specialists will find out what has gone wrong and offer possible remedies. If any additional corrections for your DNS records are needed, we return to step 5.
   
   
9. As soon as the DNS records are in effect, the warm-up procedure is initiated automatically. It usually takes 40 days, during which the system will automatically adjust the mailing volumes on a per-hour and per-domain basis. This minimizes the risks of spam blocking, allowing you to gradually build up a solid reputation for an IP.

10. Consistency, gradualness and regularity are vital for a proper warmup, so the mailings need to be done in smaller chunks. As a result, large campaigns may be partially delayed. Generally, there are two ways to deal with such tasks:

    • The default “hard limit” scheme suggests that our system allocates as many emails as can be sent from new IPs during a 10-hour period. Any daily emails over this quota will be sent via the common IP address pool. This sequence guarantees proper IP warmup and queue management. However, the maximum queueing delay with this scheme will be 10 hours.
    • The “soft limit” scheme, available upon request, requires instant redistribution of emails between dedicated and common IPs. With smaller email quantities or irregular flows, dedicated IPs may not be properly warmed up, as the common IP pool provides substantially higher throughput. This is why we recommend this scheme only if you can provide a steady flow of emails with regard to the hourly limits table, shown below.
      
      

      During the IP warmup period, it is highly recommended that you send the required number of emails each day.

11. IP warmup is carried out automatically following a proven procedure. Our anti-spam team members will monitor delivery rates for every IP and advise you on quota adjustments to get the best results.

    Warmup limits table

    The approximate hourly limits for Gmail and Yahoo Mail are shown in the table below for reference. The exact quotas, aimed at minimizing the possibility of spam blocks, vary depending on mailbox provider, the day of the warm up sequence and many other factors.
    
    

    Day of warmup	Google, emails per hour	Yahoo, emails per hour
    1	48	48
    2	57	57
    8	225	225
    15	1100	1000
    23	12000	2500
    28	47000	5000
    35	unlimited	10000
    40	unlimited	unlimited

12. To learn what your current exact quotas are, feel free to contact our tech support anytime. As soon as the warmup procedure is over (typically in 40 days), all limits are removed, and your IPs will be used for all of your mailings.

We wish you all the best using UniOne, and may all your emails reach the designated inboxes!

UniOne offers great collaboration features for your email marketing. You can let your designer manage templates, provide marketers with statistics, and give network admins access to domain settings.

Types of access

Several types of access are already defined: administrator, developer, tech support, marketer, accountant, designer, client and customized. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Administrator

Maximum access rights. This role has control over every available setting, except the primary email address and password.

Developer

Similar to Administrator, but some settings are read-only, such as account details, payment settings and tariff.

Marketer

This role grants access to all pages under Tools and Statistics menus. This means a user will be able to work with templates, assess deliverability rates, download event data in CSV (including email addresses), examine delivery problems and manage address statuses.

Tech support

The Support role has the exact same rights as the Marketer described above, and can also access Settings in read-only mode (the API key will not be displayed).

Accountant

This role has full access to tariff, balance, and payment history information, and can also change the tariff plan. The Accountant can view statistical data, but CSV download is not available.

Designer

The only option available for Designer is to view and edit templates in your account.

Client

This role grants access to Statistics only, including the ability to download data.

Customized

If for some reason none of the roles described above fits your particular needs, you may set custom access permissions by checking the options you want to grant.

How to set up shared access

Click the menu button, navigate to Settings – Shares Access and invite a new collaborator by clicking the plus sign.

In the dialog box you should specify the new workgroup member’s email address, and set the allowed rights. If the Readonly box is checked, they will be able to view the data without making any modifications.

After clicking OK, the person will receive a confirmation email. If your addressee does not have a UniOne account yet, they will be prompted to create one.

By clicking the confirmation link (and completing the sign-in process, if necessary) the person will receive the capacity to switch to your account by clicking the corresponding option in the top left corner.

Your colleagues will see only those menu items you’ve granted them access to.

Modifying and disabling a share

To add, modify or revoke previously given rights, you click on the pencil icon for the corresponding share. By clicking the cross icon, you permanently delete the person from the list. If you want to restrict their rights only temporarily, simply uncheck all boxes – this way you won’t need to create the entry anew.

The two-factor authentication function will help to protect your account from intruders.

After logging in using email and password, the system will prompt you to enter a code from the Google Authenticator application installed on your mobile device (the code changes every 30 seconds). This way a hacker won't be able to log in just by stealing your password.

• How to enable
• How to log in
• How to recover your password
• How to disable

How to enable 2FA

1. Visit the dedicated page for managing two-factor authentication (section "Account" -> "Security"), then click the "Configure" button:
   
2. On your mobile device, add your UniOne account to the Google Authenticator app.

   Install the Google Authenticator app (iOS / Android) on your mobile device. In the application, click the "Add account" button (choose one of two options: scan a QR code or enter the digital code)

   If you have chosen "Scan QR-code" - point the camera at the code in the UniOne 2FA settings page.

   If you selected "Enter code" - enter the name of your account (e.g., "UniOne") and enter the code that is specified on the two-factor authentication settings page in the UniOne account.

   You have successfully added your UniOne account to the Google Authenticator app!

3. Enter the six-digit code from the Google Authenticator app and click the "Enable" button:
   

Two-factor authentication has been successfully enabled.

Make sure your mobile device time is set automatically. If the time of your device is set manually, the new access codes generated every 30 seconds may be out of sync and lead to an error when entering.

How to log in with 2FA enabled

Enter your email and password on the log in page.

Enter the six-digit code from the Google Authenticator app on your mobile device and click on the "Sign in" button.

How to recover your password with 2FA enabled

Enter your email and click on the "Recover password" button.

Open the Google Authenticator app on your mobile device to view the code.

Enter the six-digit code from the Google Authenticator application on your mobile device and click on the "Recover password" button once more.

How to disable 2FA

Go to the two-factor authentication management page.

Enter the six-digit code from the Google Authenticator app on your mobile device and click on the "Disable" button.

After doing this you will see a page without the enabled function and with the "Configure" button.

Important! If you do not have access to your mobile device with the Google Authenticator app installed, please contact support.

In this report, you can see data for messages that could not be delivered to the recipients, or about which there were complaints - for the last 32 days, today included:

You can choose an arbitrary period within these 32 days. If the period is one day, then a detailed hourly breakdown of events for those 24 hours will be shown, if the period is more than a day, then the breakdown will be daily.

In this case, the “day” is defined by the UTC time zone.

You can filter events by selecting sender email address and / or recipient domain. Do not forget to click the "Apply" button after changing dates or sender/recipient filters to update the graph.

You can choose one of two data display modes:

All events - in this mode, each delivery failure event is counted and leads to an increase in the number of events of a defined failure type on the day that the event occurred (or per hour, if the statistics are broken down by hour). For example, a message which has been rejected as spam after 10 retries will be counted as sent 9 times and rejected as spam one time.

Unique events - this mode counts only events that are unique for a single message within a day (or an hour for an hourly breakdown). If during the day there were several repeated attempts to deliver the email, then only one retry will be counted. 

Events are divided into the following groups:

• Retries. These are the so-called "soft bounces", i.e. replies from the recipient's server about the temporary impossibility of delivering the email. UniOne will make repeated attempts to deliver these emails over two days.
• Unavailable. This group includes email addresses to which, according to UniOne’s information, delivery is impossible or prohibited. These can be addresses, messages to which have been repeatedly rejected by the recipient's server for a long time. Either the owners of the addresses have previously complained about the emails or have asked to add them to a permanent block list. Some of these statuses can be reset using the Email Search tool.
• Non-existent. The recipient server replied that the address does not exist or is inactive. This is a "hard bounce", i.e. permanent error, with such an error it is pointless to try to send the same email again.
• Rejected as spam. There were one or more delivery attempts, but the recipient's server rejected the letter explaining that it considers it to be spam. Also a "hard bounce".
• Other non delivery. The email was rejected for reasons other than “rejected as spam” or “address does not exist,” or the reason could not be reliably identified. This is also a "hard bounce".

Statistics for the current day may be a little late as it takes some time to process and index the data. Usually, this delay will not exceed an hour.

If you are using projects, then in the upper left corner of the screen you can switch to viewing statistics for a single project, for the main project (main account), or select “all projects” to view summary statistics for all projects at once.

In this report, you can see the data on the delivery events of your email messages for the last 32 days, today included:

You can choose any particular period within these 32 days. If that period is one day, then a detailed hourly breakdown of events for those 24 hours will be shown, if the period is more than a day, then the breakdown will be daily.

In this case, the definition of any day is determined by the UTC time zone.

You can filter events by selecting sender email address and / or recipient domain. Do not forget to click the "Apply" button after changing dates or sender/recipient filters to update the graph.

You can choose one of two data display modes:

• All events - in this mode, each event is counted and leads to an increase in the number of events of a defined type on the day that the event occurred (or per hour, if the statistics are broken down by hour). For example, an email sent and delivered after a third retry, and then read twice, will count as a send, delivery, three retries, and two read events.
• Unique events - this mode counts only events that are unique for a single message within a day (or an hour for an hourly breakdown). For example, an email sent and read twice yesterday and read three times today will count as one sending, delivering, and reading yesterday and one reading for today - with a daily breakdown. 

Events are divided into the following groups:

• Sent. The first attempt to send an email to the recipient's SMTP server is counted. Retries, if any, are not counted. But temporary errors (soft bounces) that lead to retries are counted in the Failures group.
• Delivered. If the recipient's server has accepted the message, then this event is counted in the “Delivered” group. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee that it will reach the inbox - despite the confirmation of delivery, the recipient's server may delay the message for some time to study it or even send it to the "Spam" folder.
• Opened. The fact of an email being read is tracked by viewing a small one-pixel image at the end of the email. This does not always work exactly - some mail services or programs may block this type of tracking. But in general, the tendency to increase or decrease interest in your emails allows you to control the process. Read/open tracking is possible only if the email/send API method track_read = 1 parameter was used when sending.
• Clicked. These are clicks on any of the links from the email, with the exception of unsubscribe links. Click tracking is only possible if the email/send API method track_links = 1 parameter was used when sending.
• Unsubscribed. Only unsubscriptions made via the UniOne unsubscribe link or unsubscribe block are counted, as well as the List-Unsubscribe header generated by UniOne. You can read more about unsubscribe links here.
• Complained. This category includes email addresses whose owners have clicked the "this is spam" button which UniOne discovered by using FBL technology.
• Bounced. Temporary delivery errors (soft bounces) and permanent delivery errors (hard bounces) fall into this category. A breakdown of nondelivery by reason can be seen in the non delivery report. 

Statistics for the current day may be a little late, as it takes some time to process and index the data. As a rule, the delay will not exceed an hour.

If you are using projects, then in the upper left corner of the screen you can switch to view statistics for a single project, for the main project (main account), or select “all projects” to view summary statistics for all your projects at once.

In UniOne, statistics can be obtained in several different ways:

• Statistics section
• Dashboard on the main page
• Event-dump methods
• Webhook API

Statistics section

If you need detailed visual statistics, then open "Statistics" menu section in UniOne control panel.

In the delivery report, you can see the success of your mailing for the last month broken down into different sections - taking into account the sending address and the delivery domain, with daily or hourly details, the absolute number of all events or only unique reads / transitions.

In the non-delivery report, you can study the reasons for any non-deliveries in the last month to understand how to fix the situation. Here, too, there is the possibility of filtering by sending address or domain, there is also a daily or hourly detailing. And don't forget that UniOne also provides you with the ability to view last week's SMTP error messages directly from the recipient servers for each individual email on the Delivery Issues page.

Dashboard

When you log in, you will see the latest deliverability summary on the home page. It is simple, in comparison with the statistics section - the data is shown only for the last week and without the possibility of filtering. But on the other hand, it is updated in real time, in contrast to the more functional, but slightly lagging statistics section.

Event-dump methods

A set of API methods used to obtain a list of events for a given time period in CSV format. Data is stored for up to 45 days, depending on your tariff. This means that you can request data starting from 00:00:00 45 days ago and up to the current time. For high volume senders, the period defaults to 7 days and may be extended upon request. You can limit the report to certain recipient and sender addresses, campaign IDs, etc. using filters.

Webhook API

If you need both real-time and the most detailed information at the same time, then you can connect through the Webhook API notifications about all events that occur with each email you send. This includes e.g. the links clicked, information about the user's browser or responses from SMTP servers. To do this, you will need to program a notification handler, but with detailed documentation this is not so difficult, and we recommend this method to you if you are looking to develop a serious solution. Benefits include:

• Unlimited storage time - you decide how much to keep.
• Any analytical slices are based on the most complete raw data - load them into your favourite analytical system and process them as you want.
• Data in real time - you can build on them your own trigger system of reactions to the actions of your users.

Working with the transactional emails service UniOne you may encounter instances of the system blocking the delivery of your emails, causing them to not reach their destination.

According to the company's anti-spam policy, UniOne provides automatic spam blocking. Perhaps sending from your account to some domains has been blocked.

General principles of spam blocking

1. If user’s emails, sent from one UniOne server (SMTP), are rejected as spam by the recipient's server (eg, gmail, hotmail.com, etc.) for 10 times, the system will block the sending of messages from the current SMTP server, and then continue sending using other servers.
2. If 5 UniOne servers are blocked for the particular domain, the system restricts sending to this domain and will no longer try to send emails to the recipients from this domain.

More information about spam blocking

Information about outgoing UniOne SMTP servers and recipient domains blocking can be obtained by a webhook (setting event “spam_block” : [“*”]).

The information will be returned as follows:

 { 
            "event_name":"transactional_spam_block",
            "event_data":
            { 
              "block_time":"YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS",
              "block_type":"one_smtp",
              "domain":"domain_name",
              "SMTP_blocks_count":8,
              "domain_status":"blocked"
             }
 } 

where:

block_time - outgoing SMTP blocking time (UTC)

block_type - can return one_smtp (if a single SMTP was blocked), all_smtp (if all SMTPs were blocked for the recipient’s domain)

domain - recipient’s domain name

SMTP_blocks_count - counter that shows the quantity of the blocked SMTP

domain_status - can return blocked or unblocked (shows whether the current domain is allowed to send to)

If you have a problem with sending to a particular domain and this domain is restricted but you are sure that the content you are sending is acceptable (not spam), feel free to contact the support to solve your problem.

Visual editor allows you to create an email which will look equally attractive on your laptop, mobile or tablet.

An email is comprised of horizontal rows, which in turn may contain one or more diverse blocks: texts, images, buttons, or videos. By default a new email consists of one row containing one block. You can add more rows with the necessary number of blocks by switching to the ROWS tab and dragging the appropriate preset row onto your email.

Next, you add the required content to each block by switching to the CONTENT tab and dragging the necessary content type onto the related block.

 Each row can be deleted or duplicated at need. When you left click any unused area inside the row, a small menu pops up on the right containing a trash icon (click to delete the row) and a double-square icon (click to duplicate the row). A four-arrow handle also appears on the left, allowing you to relocate the row.

When a row is selected, the ROWS tab shows a number of properties for this row. You may adjust the number of columns, change background colors and more.

If you click any block instead, the same icons and handle will apply to this block only.

If you click the Revert button in the lower right corner of the editor, you will cancel your most recent action. A click on the timer icon shows the entire editing history.

When you are satisfied with the result, click the “Continue” button in the upper right corner. The editor will close and you will see the result in preview mode. IMPORTANT NOTICE: the template is not yet saved, as other properties might have been changed. To save the entire template, including your design changes, you must then click the "Save" button.

• Default unsubscribe footer in UniOne
• Customizing the design
• Disabling the unsubscribe link
• Projects and unsubscribe links

The unsubscribe link is your ally and should be present in every email, whether transactional or mass mailing. Anti-spam systems take it into account when deciding if the letter is SPAM, and if the link is missing, an addressee might issue a SPAM complaint instead of simply unsubscribing, which is bad for your sender reputation. For these reasons UniOne appends an unsubscribe block to every email.

Default unsubscribe footer in UniOne

The unsubscribe footer contains a reference to the original target address (so that the reader always knows the correct address even if the email has been redirected a few times) as well as the unsubscribe link which leads to an unsubscribe page with a neutral visual theme. The language of both the unsubscribe footer and unsubscribe page is set by the corresponding API call URI, or by the "global_language" parameter found in the X-UNIONE header if the email is sent with SMTP. Languages supported for now: be, de, en, es, fr, it, pl, pt, ru, ua.

In addition to the visible unsubscribe footer, UniOne also adds the List-Unsubscribe email header which provides a link for instant unsubscribing. Many email clients and services make use of this header by adding an Unsubscribe button.

UniOne keeps track of all unsubscribed addresses and will deny sending any further emails to them. To find out whether a particular address is unsubscribed, you may use the suppression/get API method for a particular address, or the suppression/list method  to obtain the full list of unsubscribed addresses (where "cause"="unsubscribed"). Alternatively, you may use your personal account on the Email search page to manually lookup an address. You can reset the 'unsubscribed' status via suppression/delete API method, or manually using the Email Search page, or by sending a new invitation email with email/subscribe method.

Customizing the design

You have the option to adjust the placement and appearance of the unsubscribe link according to your requirements. You only need to insert the link into your email body wherever you wish. The exact link format depends on the template engine you are using. You currently have two options to choose from:

• For a Simple template engine, the link is inserted in the following way:
  <a href="{{UnsubscribeUrl}}">Unsubscribe</a>.
• For a Velocity template engine, the proper format is:
  <a href="$UnsubscribeUrl">Unsubscribe</a>.

In most cases, you may also need to disable the default unsubscribe footer, in order to avoid unnecessary duplication (see below for instructions). The same applies if you are creating your own customized unsubscribe page and add the corresponding link to your emails. In this case you need to implement such a page on your own site, and you are also taking the responsibility of processing unsubscribe requests.

Disabling the unsubscribe link

In order to cancel adding our unsubscribe footer to all or some of your emails, you will need to contact our tech support. Depending on your mailing volumes and usage statistics this may also require signing an additional responsibility agreement with your company.

The following two options are available:

• If you need to disable the unsubscribe link for certain emails only ('dynamic' disabling), you may do this by adding the skip_unsubscribe parameter to your email/send API request (or to X-UNIONE header of SMTP request). This removes both the unsubscribe footer and List-Unsubscribe header.
• It is also possible to disable adding the default unsubscribe link to all of your emails, regardless of the skip_unsubscribe parameter ('forced' disabling). In this case, the List-Unsubscribe header will still be added, but you will be able to replace it with your own, see details below.

You need to select one of the above options while placing your support request. We recommend using dynamic disabling as the most flexible option.

The List-Unsubscribe header value may be set by using the options.unsubscribe_url parameter of the email/send method. We strongly advise that you do not neglect this possibility. It is also recommended that the link cancels the addressee's subscription directly, without further confirmation -- this is required for proper support by many email clients such as Gmail.

As mentioned above, if our unsubscribe link is disabled, you take the sole responsibility of processing unsubscribe requests. To maintain good delivery rates, be sure to never send emails to unsubscribed addresses. If you would prefer to double check this, be sure to call the suppression/set method with "cause"="unsubscribed" for each unsubscribe request you process; the addresses will be tagged as unsubscribed on our side too.

Projects and unsubscribe links

Projects are a convenient way of managing subscriptions with different themes. If an addressee unsubscribes from a particular project, it does not affect his/her subscription to other projects.

If you are already using the unsubscribe link disabling, you may disable it for a certain project while not disabling for other ones:

• If you set custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled=true using either project/create or project/update methods, an unsubscribe link will be added to all emails for this project regardless of the skip_unsubscribe value.
• If you set custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled=false, an unsubscribe link will not be added if skip_unsubscribe=1 (however it will be added by default if the parameter is omitted); note that this case requires dynamic disabling of the unsubscribe link.
• If custom_unsubscribe_url_enabled parameter is not set for a new project, it will be inherited from the global account settings. You can later change the setting using the project/update method.

• Accessing the embedded object
• Array iteration (in embedded object / array)
• Call the Nth array element
• Access the index of the current array element
• Convert to lowercase
• URL and HTML escaping
• Date and time formatting
• if/else conditions

Accessing an embedded object

Allows you to access the variables found in the substitutions object.

Substitution example: (parameter global_substitutions — email/send, template/set ; substitutions — email/send):

...
"substitutions": 
{
    "person": 
    {
        "name":"John",
        "secondName":"Doe",
        "age":"26"
    }
}

"html":"<h2>Hello, $person.name $person.secondName !</h2>"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "petList": 
            [
                {
                  "name":"John",
                  "price":"30"
                },
                {
                  "name":"Harold",
                  "price":"15"
                }
            ]
        }

"html":
 "#foreach( $pet in $petList )
    $pet.name for only $pet.price
 #end"

...
 "substitutions":
        {
          "DogsAndCats":
            [
              {
               "pet":
                 [
                  {
                   "concreteAnimal":"Brown Cat"
                  }
                 ]
              }
            ]
        }

"html":
"#foreach( $pet in $DogsAndCats)
  #foreach( $concreteAnimal in $pet.pet)
    Buy this $concreteAnimal.concreteAnimal
  #end
#end"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "petList": 
            [
                {
                  "name":"John",
                  "price":"30"
                }
            ]
        }

"html":
"$petList.get(0).get("name")"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "catsArray": 
            [
              "cat":"black" 
            ]
        }

"html":
"#foreach( $cat in $catsArray )
  Index of $cat is  $catsArray.indexOf($cat)
#end"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "UpperCASE":"TEST" 
        }

"html":
"$UpperCASE.toString().toLowerCase()"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "url": "hello here & there",
          "html_code":"\’bread\" & \"butter\’"
        }

"html":
"$esc.html($html_code)
$esc.url($url)"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "date_Birthdate":"01/01/1970" 
        }

"html":
"$dateFormat.format('yyyy-M-d', $date_Birthdate)"

...
 "substitutions": 
        {
          "shoeSize":"5" 
        }

"html":
"These shoes are  
  #if( $shoeSize > 5 )
      too big
  #elseif( $shoeSize < 5 )
      too small
   #else
      just right
   #end
   for my brother."

Apache Velocity template engine can handle objects and arrays substitutions using loops and if/else conditions. This will significantly reduce the time spent on the same letter templates development or development of the template parts. Using Velocity once is enough to create a pattern, which will be filled automatically by structured substitutions processed in the request. Depending on the conditions specified in the template, Velocity will handle substitutions, replacing the variables with the values ​​or transforming their values ​​by a given algorithm. Using complex substitutions (objects, arrays) will also reduce the size of requests, thereby increasing the processing speed, and speed up sending emails as a result.

For more information about Velocity functionality supported by UniOne: Velocity use cases

Using Velocity in UniOne allows you to use the substitutions with objects and arrays to create emails with dynamic content. This significantly reduces the size of the traffic and automates the process of creating templates with identical structures that differ only by the content.

The substitutions can be used in the following parameters (methods email/send and template/set):

• body.html
• body.plaintext
• body.amp
• subject
• headers
• options.unsubscribe_url
• from_name

Velocity use cases

• Accessing the embedded object
• Array iteration (in embedded object / array)
• Call the Nth array element
• Access the index of the current array element
• Convert to lowercase
• URL and HTML escaping
• Date and time formatting
• if/else conditions

This template engine substitutes data fields surrounded by double curly braces. For example, if you have recipient's name in Name field you can use this expression: {​​{Name}}.

There are a couple of extra possibilities also (they do not work inside links thou):

{ ​{ Name|Dear Subscriber } } 

{ { Name| { { Email } } } }

{ { HasOrders?You have 10% discount } }

{ { HasOrders? { { Discount } } } }

Congratulations { {Name?, } } { { Name } }!

Each email sent with email/send method or each template referenced by group of template methods is using one of the two supported template engines:

• Simple template engine: substitutes within double curly braces.
• Velocity template engine: more sophisticated template processor.

Templates allow send emails faster and make them more personalized, so take your chance to learn their abilities.

If you see an exclamation mark in the upper left corner of your account screen along with a notice “Sending disabled”, or you receive an API error 215 error “The user is not allowed to send email”, this means that mailing has been disabled for your account.

This may happen due to the following reasons:

• You have not paid one or more bills, and a number of charging attempts we’ve made were unsuccessful. Please be sure to check all due invoices on your Billing/Invoices page. If any questions arise, do not hesitate to contact our support. As soon as we receive your payment, you may resume mailing.
• Our automatic spam prevention system sees some of your activity as highly suspicious. If you believe the system is wrong, please contact our support team. The accident will be promptly investigated, and we’ll fine tune the system to prevent similar occasions in the future.
• Support team members could also have manually disabled the mailing function for your account. Contact us to find out why.

This measure being an extremity, we still have to resort to it on certain occasions, since UniOne’s high deliverability attracts spammers quite often.

We offer following integrations and libraries:

• Make.com (former Integromat) integration
• Zapier integration
• Bloomreach/Exponea CDP integration
• Fast Track
• UniOne Ruby gem
• UniOne PHP library
• UniOne C# library on github.com and UniOne C# library on nuget.org
• Drupal module
• Collection for Postman

If you're interested in UniOne plugin for a particular service or need a library for another programming language, please contact our support.

May 22, 2024 (v.1.61)

• new 'aggregate' and 'dump_fields' parameters added to event-dump/create method.

Sep 27, 2023 (v.1.52)

• added the option to process certain headers "To:", "CC:", and "BCC:" for SMTP - with strict compliance to the SMTP specification, where "To:", "CC:", and "BCC:" MIME headers will be included as-is. To enable this option, set the "strict" parameter value to "true" in the X-UNIONE header. Alternatively, you may contact support to enable this option for all letters by default, without having to add an extra parameter. More details in SMTP API.
• added a new system unsubscribe language, "kz". The full list of supported languages: be, de, en, es, fr, it, pl, pt, ua, ru, kz.
• new webhook event "subscribed" added. You may add to the list of events you already track.

May 11, 2023 (v.1.46)

• new email validation method added email-validation/single.
• passing List-Unsubscribe-Post header allowed now if you have a right to turn off standard unsubscribe footer.

Mar 1, 2023 (v.1.44)

• new backend_id parameter in project/create, project/update, project/list methods.
• message.custom_backend_id and message.smtp_pool_id parameters in the email/send method call may now be utilised by all users without having to contact technical support.

Feb 14, 2023 (v.1.44)

• new message.bypass_global, message.bypass_unavailable, message.bypass_unsubscribed and message.bypass_complained parameters for email/send method call.

Dec 23, 2022 (v.1.41)

• email/send method has been updated to support message.tags parameter.
• two new methods for tag management have been added, tag/list and tag/delete.
• statistical charts were modified to support filtering by tags and campaign id.

Oct 18, 2022 (v.1.38)

• new event-dump/* methods were added which implement export of event data in CSV format.
• If you are allowed to disable the Unsubscribe link, you may fully disable the template engine by specifying "template_engine":"none" in email/send or SMTP call.
• the "campaign_id" metadata field has got a special function: it can now be used with event-dump/create method call to filter events related to a given campaign . A similar option will later be added for filtering statistical data for diagrams in your account. If you need to use a different variable name for this purpose, please contact our support.

Jun 24, 2022 (v.1.34)

• new methods added: suppression/set and suppression/list
• it's allowed to pass References and In-Reply-To headers in addition to the List-Unsubscribe header for users with the right to remove unsubscribe footer

Mar 18, 2022 (v.1.31)

• new template_id parameter in X-UNIONE header for sending with SMTP
• new country parameter in project/create, project/update, project/list methods

Feb 23, 2022 (v.1.30)

• new message.options.send_at parameter for email/send method call.
• added the ability to change the language of the unsubscribe footer using message.global_language parameter or the X-UNIONE-Global-Language in message.header.
• added the ability to select a template engine through the X-UNIONE-Template-Engine in message.header.

Dec 28, 2021 (v.1.28)

• new suppression/get and suppression/delete methods added.

Jul 5, 2021 (v.1.19)

• added several new languages support for unsubscribe page. The full list of supported languages: be, de, en, es, fr, it, pl, pt, ru, ua.

May 31, 2021 (v.1.17)

• new email/send parameter message.options.custom_backend_id.

Mar 17, 2021 (v.1.16)

• API POST request size limit was incremented to 10MB, HTTP code 413 / API code 199 is returned in case of a larger request.

Feb 24, 2021 (v.1.15)

• 2 days retry guarantee for messages with soft_bounced status.
• new email/send parameter message.options.smtp_pool_id.
• added "es" and "ua" languages for unsubscribe page.
• some returned HTTP codes changed to correspond with API error codes. You can find full list here.

Jan 4, 2021 (v.1.14)

• new authentication method added: passing API key in HTTP header X-API-KEY
• passing List-Unsubscribe, List-Subscribe, List-Help, List-Archive, List-Owner headers allowed now if you have a right to turn off standard unsubscribe footer
• Substitutions (merge tags) are now supported in header values.

Dec 7, 2020 (v.1.13)

• new webhook/list method added
• new "status" field for webhooks with possibility to disable and activate webhooks without deleting
• auto-stop with email notification of webhooks constantly failing during 24 hours (minimum 10 calls)

Nov 20, 2020 (v.1.12)

• new system/info method added
• new "project_id" field added to all projects methods and to webhook call data
• project_id as a login option for SMTP API added
• custom List-Unsubscribe header now allowed in SMTP API after support approval
• new "editor_type" field added to all template methods

Oct 16, 2020 (v1.11)

• updated SMTP API has been launched.

Sep 24, 2020 (v.1.10)

• new "skip_unsubscribe" and "force_send" parameters added to email/send method
• email/send parameter "metadata" renamed to "global_metadata", but old name is still accepted for backward compatibility
• email/subscribe parameters renamed to match email/send parameters, but old names are still accepted for backward compatibility

June 03, 2020 (v.1.7)

• Project API added
• AMP support improved: message.body.amp parameter added to email/send and template.body.amp parameter to template/set, template/get, template/list methods, is_amp parameter is now ignored.
• obsoleted "login" parameter from webhooks was removed and new "project_name" parameter was added

March 03, 2020 (v.1.5)

• username parameter in all methods is now ignored, user is authorized only by api key
• user_id field has been added to webhooks
• obsoleted methods removed: checked_email, set-domain, validate, getCheckedEmail, getSenderDomainList, setSenderDomain, validateSender

Web API UniOne allows you not only to send emails lightning fast, but also to deal with unsubscribes, domains, separate projects or to get statistics with webhooks. You can browse all the methods in our Web API Reference.

All UniOne API methods require an HTTPS connection. UniOne accepts HTTP POST requests in JSON format up to 10 megabytes long and returns an HTTP response also in JSON. In case of error the JSON body with an error description and an API error code is returned, but you will also receive a corresponding HTTP return code. You can read more about error handling here.


You should send an API request to the server your account is registered at:

• eu1.unione.io - european UniOne server

• us1.unione.io - USA & Canada UniOne server

SMTP allows sending up to 5000 emails per hour using single connection, and with 10 maximum permitted connections it could be up to 50 000 emails per hour. Web API allows sending up to several millions emails per hour, so consider using Web API if speed is your priority. But the good news is that SMTP integration is very simple, you just need to set some connection parameters. And don't forget to read our emails about API updates or take a look on changelog periodically.

SMTP Connection parameters

• host: either smtp.us1.unione.io or smtp.eu1.unione.io (for accounts registered at us1.unione.io and eu1.unione.io, respectively).

• port: 25, 465 or 587. Only encrypted TLS connections are supported, with recommended version 1.2 or higher. We provide no support neither for unencrypted port 25 SMTP connections nor for encrypted SSL connections due to security reasons. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 support was terminated in the middle of 2021.

• username: user_id (you can see it in the upper left corner of the screen under your email after login) or project_id (you can get it by project/create or project/list method, and also on Projects page).

• password: API key of your account or project_api_key (you can get it by project/create or project/list method, and also on Projects page)

• encoding: connection encoding should be set to UTF-8

Extended features

You can use extended features of UniOne while sending thru SMTP, such as substitutions(merge tags), templates, link and read tracking.To access these features you should pass an extra header X-UNIONE with parameters in JSON format. Many parameters from email/send are supported together with extra parameter "global_language". E.g.:

{
  "global_language": "en",
  "template_engine": "velocity",
  "template_id": "5c046a8b-6f6b-4f0b-a5b6-1d0ff8953ac7",
  "global_substitutions": {
    "DiscountCode":"XMAS",
    "Name": "John"
  },
  "global_metadata": {
    "meta-campaign": "transactional"
  },
  "track_links":1,
  "track_read":1,
  "skip_unsubscribe":0
}

All supported X-UNIONE JSON parameters

Implementation details

• Maximum accepted email size is 10 megabytes.
• Please don't forget that all headers, including X-UNIONE header, should be encoded according to MIME standard, if contain non-ASCII characters. The majority of programming languages have special functions for such an encoding. For example, in PHP it's a mb_encode_mimeheader function.
• There's a limit of 300 bytes for header line length in UniOne. You should divide a header into several lines if it's longer than 300 bytes. Usually the same function that does MIME encoding also takes care of line splitting. For example, in PHP it's the same mb_encode_mimeheader.
• Please note that unsubscribe link is automatically added to the footer of your email, unless you pass skip_unsubscribe=1 parameter in X-UNIONE header or ask support to disable unsubscribe link for all of your SMTP and API sent emails. Information about unsubscriptions can be obtained through webhooks or by calling suppression/get и suppression/list methods (where "cause"="unsubscribed").
• Please note that by default UniOne deviates from the SMTP specification in the way it handles the "CC:" and "BCC:" fields. Each address listed in these fields will receive its own copy of the letter, in which the MIME To: header will contain that target address only, and original "To:" and "CC:" headers will be removed. Each copy will be charged for according to your tariff. Also, values for global_substitutions will apply to all copies; thus, for personalized emails it is advised to use single messages. If you need the SMTP specification to be followed strictly, with "To:" and "CC:" headers being left intact (which may be required to implement carbon copy and blind carbon copy functionality), you may set the strict parameter value to true in the X-UNIONE header (or, alternatively, contact tech support to have strict=true set by default for all of your letters, without having to specify the parameter in X-UNIONE. To prevent malpractices, we also perform additional validation on RCPT TO: it must contain only addresses that are present in "To:" and "CC:" MIME headers, or addresses on your own validated domains. The number of addresses in CC and BCC must not exceed 10 for each header, and BCC may contain only addresses on your verified domain.
• The <body> tag is required to display the HTML content in case you are using the <html> tag. We won't accept an email without the <body> tag when the <html> tag is present.

Supported headers

We accept these headers:

• standard "From", "To", "CC", "BCC", "Reply-To", "Subject" header (but they may be changed due to substitutions and other implementation details described above)
• "List-Unsubscribe", "List-Subscribe", "List-Help", "List-Owner" and "List-Archive" headers are accepted in two cases:
  • either you have requested earlier and tech support has approved full removal of unsubscribe links for user_id/project_id used as SMTP login
  • or you have requested earlier and tech support has approved dynamic removal of unsubscribe links for given user_id/project_id AND you have passed skip_unsubscribe=1 parameter in X-UNIONE header
• headers starting with "X-" are left "as is", with a limit of 50 headers.

All other headers are stripped out.

Response

After the sending SMTP API returns Id which can be used as a value of job_id in webhooks.

Test your SMTP connection

If you need to check whether your SMTP connection works correctly or find possible issues, try our free SMTP Debug Tool to run test sessions.