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A member says they aren't receiving Novi emails from my site. What should I do?
A member says they aren't receiving Novi emails from my site. What should I do?

What to do if a member is not receiving transactional Novi emails.

Jenn Norman, CAE avatar
Written by Jenn Norman, CAE
Updated over a week ago

So, you've got a member reporting that they aren't able to receive your transactional emails. No need to panic! Troubleshooting undeliverable emails can be divided into two parts: "recipient" issues and "sender" issues.


Recipient Issues

If the majority of your emails are being delivered, then the outgoing "sender" side coming from Novi is working as it's supposed to. From there, it's time to do research on the recipient side to locate the problem. 

When a user isn't receiving an email, it's usually because their email filter has blocked it. Email filters are extremely advanced and always changing based on what their users are doing. If a recipient often doesn't open your emails, doesn't click the links in them, or simply deletes them, there's a chance that your emails are being marked as spam "behind-the-scenes" by their provider without them knowing. The same goes for their co-workers, and anyone receiving similar emails like yours. 

One suggestion is to have the member add your "from address" to his address book or trusted senders list. More often than not, if one of an ISPs recipients trust a sender, they will be more lenient to similar messages to different recipients!

--Tip: Always ask your member if the email went to spam before you spend time troubleshooting.--

Spam Filtering

If your member's company is using an email filtering service such as MessageLabs or if their settings are strict, your emails may be getting blocked, even to the member's spam/junk folder. If the company has an IT department, they may have created their own rules for what types of emails can be received. Either way, have your member check with their IT department to see if your emails are being blocked. 

You may also want to suggest that they add your email address as a "safe sender." This is a version of "whitelisting," explained in our "How members can whitelist your domain if they are not receiving your emails" article.

If your member is using Outlook, has admin access to their company's main Outlook account and isn't afraid to get a little technical, our "Troubleshooting email deliverability in Outlook" article should solve their problem.

What if the recipient is unable to contact their IT department or simply can't get access to their email settings?

If the recipient's company does not have an IT department, they may want to contact their email provider. While the ideal solution is for the recipient to contact either their company or their email provider's tech support, the final step is to have the recipient use another email address. 

If the IT department won't bend the rules or none of the above is working, ask your member for a personal email address to test, such as a Gmail account. This will almost certainly be delivered and you now have proof to your member that your emails are indeed being sent, and the issue is on the recipient side.


Sender Issues

The deliverability issue almost always falls on the recipient server, not the sender's (your site). If only one or a few emails aren't being delivered, especially if the recipients belong to the same or related companies, assume that the issue is on the recipient side. 

We (the Novi team) can confirm this by checking with our provider, SendGrid. SendGrid allows the Novi team to search for specific email addresses, find the last email sent to them and see the status. We can see the entire process the email goes through from being processed, to delivered, to opened. Alternatively, it will show if it was processed and then dropped, bounced, or deferred, and a reason why. 

If the status is Delivered, but the user has not received it, this means that the email was sent from your Novi site, but the recipient's email server is holding onto it. The Novi team is more than happy to check the status for you, but any further troubleshooting will need to be directed to the recipient's email provider or IT department. 

Note: Although extremely rare, if none of your emails (or the vast majority) are being delivered, please contact the Novi AMS team so we can check your settings and get you back in action.


Email Address is Case Sensitive

Case Sensitive - differentiating between capital and lowercase letters.

The domain name part of an email address is case insensitive (i.e. the case does not matter). 

The local mailbox part (the username), however, is case-sensitive.

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