Email Delivery Problems

So first of we try to send out an email to ourself, best one to your company email address and one to your private email address. Follow these steps:

1. Create a sample with a member containing your company email address
2. Create a sample with a member containing your private email address
3. Create a sampling project with an Email distributor and use the sample created in step 1
4. Check both inboxes to see if the invitations arrived.

Possible outcomes:

1. The email did arrive in both inboxes normally: try to send an invitation email to the address that told you, that he didn’t receive it. Create another sample for that. Proceed with step 3.
2. The email did arrive on your private email, but didn’t arrive at your company email address (also not in SPAM folder): First check if the email is written correctly, if spelled correctly proceed with Step 3.
3. The email did arrive in both inboxes, but were received in SPAM folder: proceed with step 2
4. The invitation was not received in both inboxes, also not in SPAM folder: First check if the email is written correctly, if spelled correctly proceed with Step 3.

If the invitation was received in SPAM folder, then some changes need to be done to the email invitations content. Analyzing why Emails are delivered into the spam folder is never easy. But there are tools which supports with this task.

Most likely the content of the Email is responsible for being classified as Spam. Please follow this procedure to find the root cause:

1. Use the neutral layout to send out another invitation with a very simple text and no images.
2. Use the sample created in the Step 1.
3. Check inboxes again. Is the mail still received as spam? Go to the next step.
4. Analyze the Email content (see below)

Analyze the Email content

1. Navigate to https://www.mail-tester.com/ and copy the cryptic Email address shown there
2. Create a sample with a member containing this Email address
3. Create a sampling project with an Email distributor and use the sample created in step 1
4. Wait for 5 Minutes
5. Switch back to mail-tester.com and press the “check result” button.

The most common mistake are missing alt-attributes for images. This means that the image gives no information about what it contains.

This needs to be fixed in the message template or layout depending how the setup is.

After all has been fixed repeat the above steps with the new cryptic email mail-tester shows. The email addresses from mail-tester.com can only be used once per test and cannot be used a second time.
If everything is fixed it should look like this:

If your Email is not arriving at all please execute the following steps:

1. Wait for at least 30 minutes after the invitation mails got sent.
2. Check and download the Bounce statistic

If the Email address is contained in the bounce statistic with a hard bounce there are three different possibilities:

1. The reason for the bounce is “omitted because of a previous bounce” with no further explanation. In this case create a ticket within the Survalyzer application to get support from Survalyzer.
2. The reason for the bounce is “omitted because of a previous bounce” but with further explanations like “rejected by policy. This only means that you tried more than once and the initial reason is repeated.
3. The reason for the bounce is something else.

For 2. and 3. the receiving Email Server Administrator decided to reject emails from Survalyzer for whatever reasons. In this case Survalyzer can’t do anything against it and the Email Administrator needs to change settings on the Email Server.

A hard bounce is a request to never deliver this Email address again. Since this is something serious which damages our Email Server reputation, all hard bounced Email addresses are added to our blacklist. Therefore, requesting the removal of the E-Mail from our blacklist without fixing the underlying issue doesn’t make any sense. Otherwise the address is added again on the next sending attempt.

When the whitelisting of our servers has been done or whatever other root cause is fixed, you need to create a ticket and apply to remove the Email from our blacklist.

If you experience after all these steps still Email delivery issues, get in touch with the Survalyzer support to find a solution.