What Is a Mail Stream? Meet the Hive

If you send more than one kind of email — and almost everyone does — the most valuable thing you can do early is put each kind in its own lane. In Buzzmark, those lanes are called hives.

What a hive is#

A hive is an independent mail stream. Each one has its own configuration: its own tracking settings, its own inbound address, its own webhook, and its own slice of your sending reputation. You might run a hive for password resets and receipts, a separate hive for product notifications, and another for a specific customer or side project entirely.

Think of a hive as a clean workspace for one category of mail. What happens in one hive stays in that hive.

Why you'd want more than one#

The reason comes down to reputation and clarity.

Reputation isolation. Mailbox providers judge you on how recipients react to your mail. High-complaint marketing shouldn't be allowed to poison the reputation that your critical password resets rely on. Separate hives keep those signals apart.

Cleaner configuration. You probably want open and click tracking on marketing mail, and off on transactional mail where a tracking pixel just adds weight and privacy concerns. Per-hive settings let you make that choice once, per stream, instead of per message.

Easier debugging. When each stream is separate, the message log for a hive tells a coherent story. You're not sifting receipts out of newsletters to figure out why one type is bouncing.

Setting one up#

Creating a hive takes seconds. You give it a name and a color so it's easy to spot in the dashboard, decide whether open and link tracking should be on, and you're handed an inbound address for receiving replies. From there you point your app at that hive and start sending.

You can see all your hives at a glance, each with headline counts, and drill into any one for its full configuration and message history.

A simple starting structure#

If you're just getting going, two hives is a sensible default: one for transactional mail, one for everything you initiate yourself. Split further as you grow — by product, by customer, by risk level. The whole point is that each stream can succeed or fail on its own terms, without dragging the others down.

One note: hives are created and configured here, but they can't be deleted through the API — removing a hive is done from the web dashboard, on purpose, so a stream isn't wiped out by accident.