Resolving Email Delivery Issues
One of the most frequent gripes you'll get from your members is that they're not receiving emails from the club.
This isn't the easiest issue to resolve or even control, but we've done what we can to put as much as possible back into your hands to sort out and investigate where communications issues lie.
This article shows the facilities built into the system itself, and addresses some of the problems that can occur, even though it may be out of all of our hands.
The Mechanics of Emailing from MajestriEmail Delivery IssuesEmail Address ActivityDo Not Email Register
The Mechanics of Emailing from Majestri
If you have an understanding of how Majestri actually sends emails to your members, then it may explain in advance some of the problems you're having. To gain an understanding of how it all works, please visit:
Email Delivery Issues
The first port of call is the central screen which logs delivery issues that SendGrid has encountered. It can be found on the Administration tab in the Control Room (as below).
Each entry on this screen is an instance where SendGrid has tried to deliver an email to an intended recipient and encountered an issue.
Some of the entries have an attached error message in red text, as well as a button representing an option to 'remove the restriction'.
For an email address entry that has this information and functionality, SendGrid is not attempting to send emails. The nature of the error encountered on the first attempt means that SendGrid assumes subsequent emails are not going to be delivered either, and places them on its own internal 'Block List'. It costs money to send emails, so SendGrid has taken the approach that it will not waste it by repeatedly sending to an email address where a severe error was encountered in the first instance.
Steps to Rectify
- Ensure that it is not as simple as a typo on the member's email address. This issue can be resolved by going directly to the member's record and updating the email address. Some really common typos we see are:
- Just a plain typo (eg. 'bipond.com', 'gmal.com')
- Missing ".com" or ".com.au" on the end of the email address.
- Missing "." before the ".com" (eg. someone@gmailcom).
- Extra ".au" that isn't valid.
- Just a plain typo (eg. 'bipond.com', 'gmal.com')
- Check with the member to ensure that they still own and use the recorded email address in the system.
- Check with the member to see if an email is in their junk folder and get them to flag it as 'Not Spam'. This should help resolve any problems of being marked as spam.
If, after a discussion with the member, they've convinced you that the email address is correct, and any delivery issue was only temporary, then you can click the Remove Restriction button next to the entry in the grid. This takes it off SendGrid's internal 'Block List' and attempts to send will start. Please be aware that if the same issue is encountered, then that email address will go straight back on. We'd encourage you to be careful when removing these restrictions. SendGrid still charges us for failed delivery which we don't pass onto clubs.
It's also worth noting that both Bigpond and Hotmail email addresses seem to be more troublesome than others. They can be overly aggressive when deciding what is spam, and in the case of Telstra, they can even try to impose delivery quotas on their email accounts when originating from the one source.
One More Thing
Another useful side effect of this screen is that you can see when an email address is owned by more than one person. Ideally, each email address should only be assigned to one person as it may cause problems when people want to log into the system. To understand why this is the case and how to resolve the issues, please visit:
Email Address Activity
This screen comes in very useful when somebody claims to not be receiving emails from the system. It can found on the Administration tab in the Control Room.
The screen itself is a popup and all you need to do is plug in the email address you want to investigate. We then run a query through our transactional email provider, SendGrid, and they will send back all logs of emails where an attempt was made to prepare an email to send to that address.
There are 3 outcomes you're looking for:
- If you can only see green lights, then everything looks good from our side, and we have no deeper knowledge. It is very likely that the email is in the recipients 'Spam' (or other tabs if they use Gmail).
- If you can only see red lights, then we have had a problem at some stage delivering to that email, and the Email Delivery Issues screen (described above) is the best place to investigate.
- If there are no entries at all (ie. no emails have been sent), then there's a fair chance the email address is on our Do Not Email Register (described below).
Do Not Email Register
This function can be located on the Administration tab in the Control Room.
You have a central register of email addresses where people have indicated that they do not wish to receive emails from your organisation any longer. When that happens, they end up here, and there are two ways that can occur:
- They can directly Unsubscribe from an email. When this occurs, you will also see an date that this action occurred.
- In rarer cases, they may reply to an email telling you they never want to hear from you again, and in their rage fail to notice the ability for them to unsubscribe themselves. An administrator can then add the email address into the register.
Note:- Administrators can add many address at once to the register as we provide a multi-line text field.
Important
If an email address is in this register, they will not receive any emails from the system. Australia has pretty strong anti-spam laws now, and we are not willing to take a chance that any email they receive from the system could be construed as spam. This will prevent them from signing up to future events, so they may be in touch saying they're having issues. It's a good idea to check this register and get their permission to remove the entry.