There are many reasons someone may not receive your email. The first step is to check some simple things:
- Is the email address on the mailing list?
- Is the email address correctly entered?
- Was the mailing processed or was it scheduled to be run later?
Once a properly addressed email is sent from the ContentMX server there are a few things that could happen:
- The destination domain may be invalid.
- The destination mailbox may not exist, is disabled, or full.
- The email server at the destination domain might be temporarily down (and the system will try again later).
- The spam filtering on the destination domain may reject the email and cause it to bounce back (which is visible in the Email Activity report).
- The spam filtering on the destination domain may drop the email without notifying anyone.
- The spam filtering on the destination domain may filter the email and place it in a spam folder, bulk mail folder, or (in the case of Gmail) in the Promotions tab.
How do I figure out what is happening?
Check Bulk Email Folder and/or Promotions Tab
First have your contact look for the email in their bulk mail folder or Promotions tab. If it is there, the email has arrived properly. Email newsletters coming from email marketing systems are often labeled as promotions and bulk mail. This email appear with other email of this type.
Check the Spam Folder
If the email is still not found, have your contact check their spam folder. If the email is there, have your contact move the email out of the spam folder and then ask them to add your FROM email address to their contacts list. This should keep your email from re-entering the spam folder next time.
Contact Our Deliverability Team
If the email is not anywhere to be found, send an email to support@contentmx.com to ask our deliverability team for help. With this support request you should provide the username to access your account, the date and time of your mailing, and the email address for the contacts who did not receive your email. We will use this information to check our email server logs more closely.
At the same time, have your contact reach out to the person responsible for their email server. This is usually the IT department or help desk. They may need to provide the FROM address you used when sending the email along with the approximate time and date you sent the mailing. With this information, the mail server administrator should be able to review their own logs to determine what happened to the message. The response from the server administrator will help determine the next step.
How can I prevent my email from being blocked, dropped, or categorized as spam?
There are many techniques for dealing with deliverability issues. This is more of an art form than a science. Sometimes email can be blocked because of structural issues such as IP or domain restrictions, send frequency, message size, failed authentication, spam complaints, etc.. It is also common for email to be blocked based on content. Most anti-spam technology has at least one component that reviews the content of the email and rates how spammy it is based on the words it contains.
If you are experiencing issues relating to content, here are a few things to try:
- Try a different FROM address and name.
- Change your email subject line and remove words that may be too promotional.
- Change your email body. Avoid an email that is only pictures, keep it short, and avoid too many promotional words.