Timeline Use Cases

The Contact Timeline answers questions about one specific contact. These are the situations where that's exactly what you need.

Each example starts from the contact's timeline: click the contact's name or address under Contacts → View/Search Contacts and expand Subscriber Timeline, or choose Subscriber Timeline from the contact's Actions menu.

1. Settle a spam complaint or "I never signed up"

Someone has marked your email as spam, or written in saying they never subscribed. Before you reply, find out what actually happened.

Find where they came from

The timeline shows the newest events first, so click Load More until you reach the oldest one: Added to the contact list. It tells you:

• which list they were added to, and
• when they were added.

That one 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.

Read forward

Work back up the timeline and build the picture:

What you see	What it tells you
A broadcast was sent. events	Exactly which emails they were sent, and when
Has opened an Email. and Has clicked on a link.	They were engaging: this was a real subscriber, not a bad address
A long gap with no opens or clicks before the complaint	Their interest faded. Often a frequency or relevance problem, not a consent one.
Added to the contact list. followed straight away by a run of sends	They were added and mailed heavily at once. Worth reviewing that import or form.
The email has been marked spammed	The complaint itself, against a specific broadcast

Decide what to change

The timeline separates two very different conclusions:

• A genuine subscriber who lost interest. Their history has opens and clicks. Look at how often you send and how easy your unsubscribe link is to find: someone who can't find it quickly reaches for the spam button instead.
• A contact who never really opted in. Added in a bulk import, no engagement ever, and a complaint soon after. That points at where the list came from, not at the campaign. Check what else arrived in the same import.

Either way, if the person asked you to stop, add them to Email Suppression with Global selected so no list can mail them again. See Suppression.

Check the neighbours

If the timeline points to 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 removing, not a single unhappy reader.

2. Diagnose "I'm not receiving your emails"

A subscriber says your emails stopped arriving. Open their timeline and look for the most recent send events:

What you find	Cause	What to do
No A broadcast was sent. events, or none recently	They weren't targeted.	Check the lists and segments your recent campaigns went to, and the contact's statuses.
A send followed by The email has been bounced.	A delivery problem: their mailbox refused the email.	See why in Analytics → Bounce. A hard bounce means the address doesn't work.
UnSubscribed From Campaign.	They opted out, perhaps by accident, perhaps long ago.	The event shows which email they unsubscribed from. They need to subscribe again, for example through a web form.
Sends with no bounce and no opens	Sent as far as Mumara ONE knows, but going to spam or simply unread.	Look the address up in Delivery Logs to see what the receiving server said. This is a deliverability question, not a targeting one.

The last row is the important distinction. Sent and not opened is a very different problem from never sent, and from the outside both look the same.

Also check the contact itself: a contact that's Inactive, Hard Bounced, Suppressed or marked as spam isn't mailed at all, so the timeline shows no new sends. See Contact statuses.

3. Confirm an automation, trigger or drip reached someone

You've built an automation, a trigger or a drip campaign, and want to know whether a particular person really got it: not whether it ran overall, but whether this person received that email.

Open their timeline and look for:

• A broadcast was sent. for broadcasts and for emails sent by an automation
• A triggered broadcast was sent. for trigger emails
• A drip was sent. for drip emails, with the drip and its drip group

Because everything is timestamped and in order, you can also check the pacing. If a journey should send a welcome, wait three days, then follow up, the timeline shows whether the gap really was three days.

Pairs well with statistics

Automations Stats and Trigger Stats tell you how many contacts reached each step. The timeline tells you what happened to one of them. When the totals look wrong, picking one 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 nobody remembers adding them to, or why a contact disappeared from one list and turned up on another. The timeline records list changes:

• Merge Two Contact List. The contact moved to another list because two lists were merged. The event shows both the From list and the To list.
• Split Contact List. The contact moved to a new list when a list was split.
• Added to the contact list. The contact was added directly, or copied or moved in from a segment.

This is often the answer to "we didn't put them there": a merge done 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 Has clicked on a link. events are a short, honest summary of what a person actually cares about. Each one opens the address they clicked and shows the email it came from.

Before a call, scan their timeline for:

• Which links they clicked: pricing, a particular product, a case study.
• How recently: interest last month is worth more than interest last year.
• How often: repeated clicks on the same topic are 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.

What the timeline can't tell you

Limit	Detail
It's per contact, not a total	The timeline answers "what happened to this person". For campaign-wide numbers, use Broadcast Stats and the other statistics pages.
No history from before events were recorded	The timeline doesn't reconstruct activity from before it was recording for your account.
An open is weak evidence	Some mail apps load images automatically, so Has opened an Email. doesn't prove anyone read the email. A click is far stronger. Don't build a consent argument on opens alone.
Deleted items show a note	If the related list, broadcast, campaign or drip was deleted, the event remains, with a note such as Deleted from list instead of a link.

If events seem to be missing

Events usually appear within moments. If something you expect never shows up, check the contact's other statuses first, then contact Mumara support with the contact's address and what you expected to see.

Next steps

• Timeline Event Types: what every event means and what it shows
• Contact Timeline: where the timeline appears and how to read it
• Bounces and Complaints: how Mumara ONE handles bounces and complaints