What happens after 12 months

Penomaly keeps the details of who opened and clicked each email for 12 months. After that, the details are removed and the totals are kept. Your reports still show how every campaign did, for as long as you have your account.

Why

A record of what each reader opened, for every email, kept forever, adds up to a great deal of personal information about your readers and a very large database. Twelve months covers what authors use it for most: seeing who opened a recent campaign, finding readers who have gone quiet, and checking how a launch did.

What is kept

For every campaign, forever:

• The campaign itself, its content and its send date.
• The totals: recipients, how many it reached, opens, clicks, bounces and spam complaints, and the open and click rates.
• Your readers, with their tags, lists and their Last opened date.
• Your suppression list and every reader's consent record. These are never removed, because they are what keeps an unsubscribed reader from being emailed again.

Links in old emails keep working.

What is removed

Twelve months after a campaign was sent:

• Who received it: the list of individual readers, and whether each one opened or clicked.
• Clicks for each link: the table showing how many people clicked which link.
• Each reader's individual opens and clicks for that campaign.

Before anything is removed, Penomaly works out the campaign's final totals and saves them, so the numbers on the report do not change. One small difference: an old report shows readers who were not sent the email as one number, rather than separating failures from readers skipped because they were on your suppression list.

What you will see

On a campaign sent more than 12 months ago, the report says the email went out over 12 months ago and that the totals are kept, and the per-link table and the See who received it button are no longer there.

Automation emails

Emails sent by an automation keep going out for months or years, so they are handled a little differently. Their details are removed one by one as each send turns 12 months old, and their sent, opened and clicked figures cover the last 12 months. The In it now, Finished and Left early numbers on an automation are not affected.

If an automation waits more than a year between an email and a step that checks whether the reader opened it, that check will see no open. Keep those waits under a year.

If you need a record

If you want to act on who opened or clicked a particular campaign, for example tagging the readers who clicked a preorder link, do it within the 12 months, while Who received it still has the list.