Introduction

Sometimes you may send an email to another person and they then contact you to say they have not received it. This does not mean you necessarily have a problem with your emails, as the problem may lie with the recipient’s email hosting provider.  

The treatment of spam emails

Most likely the recipient will have received the email, but their hosting provider or email client will have treated your email as potential ‘spam’ and it will have gone into a spam folder.

If you can successfully send over 99% of your emails, this means it is not a server or email account problem, but a ‘trust’ problem at the recipient’s end with the one email address that is not receiving your emails, especially if you do not get a bounced message back to say it has not been delivered.

Different hosting providers treat each email that comes into their system based on where it has come from and the credibility of the senders DNS record or email account.  Some hosting providers will err on the side of caution and sometimes put a legitimate email into a spam folder as it is unsure if it is genuine or not.   We therefore suggest doing the following:  

• Get the recipient to check their spam folder(s) for your email. If it is in their spam folder, then get them to set it as ‘NOT SPAM’. As there are different email clients such as Outlook 2016, etc. it is difficult for us to advise where this facility will be within the email clients’ settings.
• Try sending an email to another of the recipients email addresses. It could be that it is successfully delivered to one of their other email addresses. If so, then it is the recipient’s email account that is treating your emails as spam.
• Try sending them an email from another of your email accounts, from the same domain name, to see if they receive it successfully or if it goes into a spam folder too.
• Go to https://www.mail-tester.com and copy the email address they give you, then open your email client software, such as Outlook, and send a test email to the email address you have copied. Then go back to the Mail Tester web page and click on the ‘then check your score’ button to get the results. If your score is low, then we advise you to send us the link to the report so we can assess it for you and help determine the problem
• You may also not be able to send an email if your email client software is no longer supported and out of date. Examples may include Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail 2012, etc. This is because our server uses SSL/TLS to encrypt the message and older versions do not support this method of encryption. We do this to protect our server and to ensure that it does not affect other users, should a client try to send an email from an unsecure program.
• Another reason your emails may not send or be received could be to do with your security software, as most of these ‘plug in’ to your email client software. A corrupt file could stop the emails from working, so try switching off your security software temporarily and see if you can then either send or receive. If you can, you will need to contact the security software provider and get them to send a patch to repair the corrupt file. Do not forget to switch the security software back on though. Some security software also allows you to switch off only the email plug in facility.

Unfortunately email delivery can be unpredictable and sometimes have no logic. You may sometimes get an email drop into your spam folder from a customer who regularly sends you emails, and yet the next one they send you goes into your inbox as normal.

It can come down to the server security settings, the email client spam settings, any security software spam settings, the postmaster, or whether your email is on a blacklist or whitelist with the recipients email provider.

If it continues to happen, please open a support card and we shall investigated the issue at our end.  If we have investigated, then the next option is to contact the recipient another way and get them to look into their spam filtering processes.  

Be careful to not look like spam

There are many and sophisticated ways that email is examined and then thought to be spam.  Sometimes we inadvertently do things that can trigger a spam identification.   Please make sure you are not doing any of the following:  

• Using any content that can be taken to have a sexual meaning
• Using anything that may have a drug connotation
• Using all caps, i.e. the equivalent of shouting on the internet
• Using a reply to address that does not match your sent from address
• Using sales and marketing terms as these tend to be what spam is full of

As very short emails can also been seen as spam, it can be a good idea to pad out your email footer.  Here are some website with examples:   https://www.mail-signatures.com/articles/email-disclaimer-exampleshttps://startups.co.uk/business-emails-and-the-law