Worked Examples
The timeline answers questions about one specific contact. These are the situations where that's exactly what you need.
Each assumes Timeline is enabled — see Setup & Usage — and that you know how to open a contact's Subscriber Timeline panel from any contact list.
1. Settle a spam complaint or "I never signed up"
The highest-stakes use of the timeline. Someone has marked your email as spam, or written in angrily saying they never subscribed. Before you reply, find out what actually happened.
Step 1 — Open the contact's history
Find the contact in the list they complained from, open their detail panel, and expand Subscriber Timeline.
Step 2 — Scroll to the beginning
The timeline is newest-first, so use Load More until you reach the oldest entry. You're looking for the Contact Added event, which tells you:
- which list they were added to, and
- when they were added.
That single event is the foundation of your answer. A contact added eighteen months ago who has opened a dozen emails since is a very different story from one added last Tuesday in a bulk import.
Step 3 — Read forward
Walk back up the timeline and build the picture:
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Broadcast Sent entries | Exactly which emails they received, with subject lines. |
| Email Opened / Link Clicked | They were engaging — this was a real subscriber, not a bad address. |
| A long gap before the complaint | Interest faded. Often a frequency or relevance problem, not a consent one. |
| Contact Added immediately before a burst of sends | They were added and mailed heavily straight away — worth reviewing that import or form. |
| Spam Complaint | The complaint itself, against the specific broadcast. |
Step 4 — Decide what to change
Two very different conclusions, and the timeline distinguishes them clearly:
- A genuine subscriber who lost interest. They have opens and clicks in their history. Look at send frequency and at how prominent your unsubscribe link is — someone who can't find it easily will reach for the spam button instead.
- A contact who never really opted in. Added in a bulk import, no engagement ever, complaint soon after. That points at the source of the list, not at the campaign. Check what else arrived in that same import.
If the timeline suggests a bad import, the contact is rarely alone. Look at other contacts added to the same list on the same day — if they show the same pattern of no engagement, you've found a batch worth suppressing rather than a single unhappy reader.
2. Diagnose "I'm not receiving your emails"
A subscriber says your emails stopped arriving. The timeline separates three completely different causes at a glance.
Open their timeline and look for the most recent Broadcast Sent event:
| What you find | Cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| No Broadcast Sent events at all, or none recently | They were never targeted. | Check list membership and any segment conditions on your recent campaigns. |
| Broadcast Sent followed by Bounced | A delivery problem at their end or a bad address. | Read the bounce against the related broadcast; a hard bounce means the address is dead. |
| An Unsubscribed event | They opted out — possibly by accident, possibly long ago. | The event shows the campaign they unsubscribed from. They must re-subscribe themselves. |
| Broadcast Sent with no opens, no bounce | Delivered as far as Mumara knows, but landing in spam or simply unread. | A deliverability question, not a targeting one. |
That last row is the important distinction: sent and not opened is a very different problem from never sent, and without the timeline both look identical from the outside.
3. Confirm an automation actually reached someone
You've built an automation or a drip and want to know whether a particular contact really got it — not whether the campaign ran in aggregate, but whether this person received that email.
Open their timeline and look for:
- Trigger Sent — a trigger email reached them.
- Drip Sent — a drip email reached them, showing the drip and its group.
- Broadcast Sent — a regular broadcast.
Because everything is timestamped and in order, you can also verify the pacing: if a journey should send a welcome, wait three days, then follow up, the timeline shows whether the gap actually was three days.
Automation statistics tell you how many contacts reached each step. The timeline tells you what happened to one of them. When the aggregate numbers look wrong, picking a single contact and reading their timeline is usually the fastest way to see why.
4. Explain an unexpected list membership
Someone asks why a contact is on a list they don't remember adding them to — or why a contact disappeared from one list and turned up on another.
The timeline records list movements explicitly:
- Lists Merged — the contact moved to a new list because two lists were merged, showing both the source and the destination.
- Contact Split — the contact moved when a list was split.
- Contact Added — they were added directly.
This is often the answer to "we didn't put them there" — a merge performed weeks earlier moved a whole group, and the timeline is the only per-contact record of it.
5. Qualify a lead before you call
For anyone doing sales follow-up, the Link Clicked history is a short, honest summary of what a person actually cares about — each entry shows the URL they clicked and the campaign it came from.
Before a call, scan their timeline for:
- Which links they clicked — pricing, a specific product, a case study.
- How recently — interest last month is worth more than interest last year.
- How often — repeated clicks on the same topic is a strong signal.
A contact who clicked your pricing page twice in the last fortnight is a different conversation from one who opened a newsletter once in March.
Treat a click as a much stronger signal than an open. See the limits below.
What the timeline can't tell you
Worth knowing before you rely on it:
| Limit | Detail |
|---|---|
| It's per-contact, not aggregate | The timeline answers "what happened to this person". For campaign-wide numbers use your campaign or automation statistics instead. |
| No history from before it was enabled | Timeline records events from the moment it's switched on. Turning it on today won't reconstruct last year — and if it was ever switched off, that period is a gap. |
| An open is weak evidence | Privacy features pre-load images, so an Email Opened event doesn't prove a human read it. A Link Clicked event is far stronger. Don't build a consent argument on opens alone. |
| Deleted items show as "Deleted" | If the related list, campaign, or drip was removed, the event remains but links to "Deleted" rather than breaking. |
Check the event-processing mode under Application Settings → Triggers. If it's set to Laravel Queue and no queue worker is running, events queue up without ever being recorded. Real-time is the safe choice on installations without a worker — see Setup & Usage.
Next steps
- Event Types — what every event means and what detail it carries.
- Setup & Usage — enabling Timeline and choosing a processing mode.