Email and Technical Terms

Term	Description
Access Token	Long-term credentials for an Amply user. Every new user gets a unique access token when they create an account with Amply.
Account Takeover Attack (ATO)	A type of theft where a hacker gains unauthorized access to an online account with malicious intent. The attacker may seek to profit, disrupt service delivery, or generate fraudulent transactions. Amply's IDS feature helps protect against this type of attack.
API (Application Programming Interface)	A set of definitions and protocols to build and integrate application software.
Authentication Protocols	Rules located in DNS (domain name system) records for sending domains. To authenticate an email, the sending mail server and receiving mail server talk to each other, double-checking protocols in the DNS for confirmation.
Bounce	An email that gets rejected by a mail server.
Bounce Rate	The percentage of emails that were sent and failed to reach the recipient’s inbox and are instead bounced back to you, referred to as undeliverable.
Blocklist	A list of blocked emails, domains, or IP addresses that are suspected of sending spam or malicious content.
CAN-SPAM	A law that sets the rules, guidelines, and penalties for commercial email.
CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)	Legislation that requires companies to comply with user requests for all data that is collected and stored.
Churn	The percentage of customers who stopped purchasing your business's products or services during a certain period of time.
Clicks	The total number of times any link in your email was clicked by your email recipients.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)	The percentage of people who clicked on at least one link in your email message.
CNAME	A type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that maps one domain name (an alias) to another.
Complaint	Reports made by email recipients against emails they don't want in their inbox.
Customer Churn	The percentage of customers who stopped purchasing your business's products or services during a certain period of time.
Customer Engagement	The way a company creates a relationship with its customer base to foster brand loyalty and awareness.
Customer Retention	A company's ability to turn customers into repeat buyers and prevent them from switching to a competitor.
Customer Stickiness	Compares engagement by active users over a narrower time frame with their engagement over a broader time frame. The ratios can help you understand how well you retain users over time — higher ratios suggest good engagement and user retention.
Deliverability	The ability of an email message to arrive in the recipient's primary inbox. It is often measured as a percentage of emails accepted by the internet service provider (ISP). Learn more about Deliverability here.
Delivery	When an email is successfully delivered to the receiving server. It's possible to have good email delivery but poor deliverability because the email landed in a person's spam folder rather than their inbox.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)	An email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain. Learn more about DKIM here.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)	An email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol. It builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, adding linkage to the author (“From:”) domain name, published policies for recipient handling of authentication failures, and reporting from receivers to senders, to improve and monitor the protection of the domain from fraudulent email. Learn more about DMARC here.
DNS	Translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.sendamply.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 112.0.3.77).
DNS Txt Record	A type of Domain Name System (DNS) record in text format, which contains information about your domain.
Domain	A named internet address that points to an IP address.
Domain Authentication	Domain authentication is a way to verify that an email is sent from the sender it claimed to be. The most commonly used email authentication standards are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Email Analytics	The method of tracking various statistics and metrics associated with email activity. Common stats include open rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate.
Email API Integration	Allows developers to connect an application or service to an email service provider (ESP) and use the provider's functionality.
Email Authentication	Technical standards to help ISPs and other receivers prove that an email is not forged.
Email Compliance	The process of meeting detailed sets of regulatory standards and requirements in order to protect the data and privacy of your email recipients. These include CCPA (California Consumers Protection)), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
Email Encryption	An authentication process that prevents messages from being read by an unintended or unauthorized individual. It scrambles the original sent message and converts it into an unreadable or undecipherable format.
Email Logs	Contain email data on each message that has been sent, including the sender's details, recipient's email address, timestamps, and any error codes. Learn more about email logs here.
Email Parsing	Extracting data from incoming emails through the use of an API (Application Programming Interface). Learn more about Parsing here.
Email Routing	The process of ensuring that the right messages get to the right recipients. Learn more about Email Routing here.
Email Server	A software program that sends, receives, and stores messages.
Email Service Provider (ESP)	An entity like Amply that provides transactional email services. Learn more about ESPs here.
End User	An individual or entity who uses a product or service. An end user may differ from a customer—since the person or entity who buys a product or service may not be the one who actually uses it.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)	An EU law that regulates the handling of personal data and outlines the rights people have with regard to their data.
Hard Bounce	One of the 2 types of email bounces. Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures to recipients’ inboxes.
Header	The part of an email that contains information about the mail sender, receiver, and subject. Each email has a custom header that includes technical information for efficient email delivery.
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)	A federal law that protects sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge.
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)	An internet protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server.
Inbound Processing	A feature that enables users to send inbound messages to an email service provider (ESP) like Amply.
IP Address	A unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network. IP stands for Internet Protocol.
IP Warmup	The process of sending emails from a new (or cold) IP address and gradually increasing send volumes to achieve a positive reputation.
ISP (Inbox Service Provider)	Top mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook.
Message ID	A unique identifier that helps in tracking and identifying an email message. It is a string of characters that is generated by the mail server when the email is sent.
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)	An Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. MIME is an extension of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
MTA (Mail Transfer Agent)	Software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).
MX Record	Directs email to a mail server. It indicates how email messages should be routed in accordance with SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Like CNAME records, an MX record must always point to another domain.
Opens	Counts the total number of times your email was opened by all recipients.
Open Rate	The percentage rate at which your users open emails you've sent to them.
Phishing	A technique for attempting to acquire sensitive data, such as bank account numbers, through a fraudulent solicitation in email or on a website, in which the perpetrator impersonates a legitimate business or reputable person.
Postmaster	The administrator of a mail server. Nearly every domain should have the email address [email protected] where errors in email processing are directed.
Preheader	The short summary text that follows the subject line when viewing an email from your inbox.
Programmatic Email	Same as transactional email - emails that are triggered by user actions with a web application. Learn more about Programmatic Email here.
Public Key Cryptography	An encryption scheme that uses two mathematically related, but not identical, keys - a public key and a private key - to authenticate a sender’s identity or encrypt data.
Quarantined Email	Emails that have been through an email filtering system that flags them as a potential threat. This happens when messages look spammy or potentially malicious, and the ISP (inbox service provider) isn't sure of their legitimacy. Quarantined emails are moved to a quarantine area instead of getting delivered to the recipient's inbox.
Redirects	A technique that is used to redirect your domain's visitors to a different webpage.
REST API	A software architecture that defines a set of constraints on how an API should work. REST stands for Representational State Transfer.
Return Path	A hidden email header that indicates where and how bounced emails will be processed. It’s an SMTP address separate from the sending address.
Reverse DNS	A Domain Name Service (DNS) lookup of a domain name from an IP address.
Sender ID	An alphanumeric code unique to each email sender. It acts as an authentication record to validate brand identities to Inbox Service Providers (ISPs) and mail servers to prevent emails from being misinterpreted as spam.
Sender Reputation	A score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to an organization that sends email. It's a crucial component of your email deliverability. The higher the score, the more likely an ISP will deliver emails to the inboxes of recipients on their network.
Sends	Requests to deliver email to your recipients through Amply.
Single Sign-On (SSO)	An authentication method that enables users to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. Learn more about SSO here.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)	An Internet standard communication protocol for sending and receiving email.
SMTP Relay	The process of transferring an email from one SMTP server to another for delivery. Learn more about SMTP Relay here.
Soft Bounce	One of the two types of bounces. It is a temporary email delivery failure that usually happens because of some problem on the recipient's side - inbox being over the storage limit is common. Can also happen due to a server outage or an oversized file or message.
Spam	Unsolicited and unwanted email.
Spam Filter	Software-based email filters that identify spam and block it from going to the inbox.
Spam Reports	When a user marks an email message as spam in their email client.
Spam Traps	Email addresses used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blocklist operators to identify senders who aren't following email best practices.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)	An email authentication standard that helps protect senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing. Learn more about SPF here.
Spoofing	A type of cyber threat that involves sending email messages with a fake sender address.
SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer)	An encryption standard that ensures emails are not intercepted during transit and nobody except the intended recipients can access them.
Subject Line	The single line of text people see when they receive your email.
Subscriber	A user who has opted to receive email messages from a specific sender.
Templates	An HTML file composed of reusable code modules, making it as easy as copying and pasting your copy, links, and image URLs to create and send your transactional email. Learn more about Templates here.
Transactional Email	Transactional Emails represent the emails that are triggered by a user interacting with a web application. Learn more about Transactional Email here.
Transport Layer Security (TLS)	Encrypts communications between a client and server, primarily web browsers and websites/applications. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, and its more modern and secure replacement, TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption, protects data sent over the internet or a computer network.
Two Factor Authentication	A security system that requires two separate, distinct forms of identification in order to access something.
Unique Clicks	The number of times that a link in your email was clicked on by individual users, counting only one click per user. For example, if a link was clicked on 15 times by the same individual it would count as 15 total clicks but 1 unique click.
Unique Opens	The number of times that your email was opened by individual users, counting only one open per user. For example, if an email were opened 15 times by the same individual it would count as 15 total opens but 1 unique open.
Unsubscribes	The actions of users requesting their email addresses be removed from receiving any further emails or communications.
Unsubscribe Rate	The percentage of users requesting to unsubscribe versus the total amount of users. It’s helpful in understanding your email health as it provides insights into user engagement – and whether users find your content relevant or not.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)	A unique identifier used to locate a resource on the Internet like web pages or web domains.
User Acquisition	The act of gaining new users for an app, platform, or other service.
User Churn	The percentage of users who stopped using your business's products or services during a certain period of time. Churn is a quantifiable rate of change that occurs over a specified amount of time.
User Engagement	A measure of how valuable users find your product, based on how much they interact or 'engage' with your website or service.
User Experience (UI)	The practice of making an application or a website experience easy to use. This entails addressing the needs of users and making everything easy to navigate so that they can get value quickly. It's essentially how a user feels whenever they interact with a product or service.
User Interface (UI)	The visual makeup of an application or a website and the parts of the software that are presented to the user. It comprises of various touchpoints a person uses to engage with the application or website.
User Retention	The number of users who continue interacting with your product or service over a given period. This is a key metric to measure the growth of SaaS and digital products.
User Stickiness	Compares engagement by active users over a narrower time frame with their engagement over a broader time frame. The ratios can help you understand how well you retain users over time — higher ratios suggest good engagement and user retention.
Webhook	HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) callbacks that automatically send data in response to a specific event, like an email delivery. They offer a flexible way for developers to monitor their email infrastructure's health in real time. Learn more about Webhooks here.
Whitelabel	The process of showing ISPs that Amply has your permission to send emails on your behalf.
X-Message-ID	A header returned when sending email from Amply.