Transactional email
Email that completes or reports on something the recipient did or has with you: receipts, password resets, account alerts. Its reputation is worth keeping apart from marketing.
What it means
M3AAWG defines transactional messaging as messages sent to confirm a transaction between sender and recipient, or to give individual information about the status of their relationship, such as a bank alert or a password change notification. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide describes transactional or relationship messages as ones that facilitate an agreed-upon transaction or update a customer about it, and says they are exempt from most of the Act's requirements but must not contain false or misleading routing information.
Mixing content changes the category: under CAN-SPAM a message whose primary purpose looks commercial (judged by the subject line and what comes first) is commercial, and Google asks senders not to put promotions in receipts.
Send transactional mail on its own stream, with its own IP pool or subdomain.
Related terms
On this site
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
All 432 terms in the glossaryThe wiki: blocklists and bounce codes