About missing emails

Sounds like the title of an Agatha Christie whodunnit, but there are probably just as many twists and turns in the search for missing communications as there are in one of the most famous author’s mystery novels!

Missing emails, seem to be a perennial favorite for support desk inquiries and I have to admit that I’ve seen my fair share of them, however, I need to mention from the outset, not all cases are solved!?Not from a lack of will, you understand, but because of the complexity of the email trail from sender to receiver, there will come a point where it’s not viable to spend vast amounts of time resolving every single issue.?

There are, however, a few common causes of non-delivery that I can deal with here, without too much complexity.

First, we have to be as sure as possible that the email was actually sent – If the sender didn’t get a non-delivery message at the outset, then we can assume pretty much that the email was delivered to ‘someone’.

If a delivery failure notice HAS been received back, then the first port of call is to check the email address we are sending to – its no good relying on the reply-to address of something that’s been sent to you – quite a few people get this wrong when they first set up their email accounts and this causes endless issues further down the line – check the address with the person concerned and type it in yourself to be sure you’ve got it right!

Human Error is probably the most common cause of the missing email problem – over keen swiping or clicking results in the missing communication being swept into the wrong folder or even deleted by mistake. Pretty much all email software has a search facility so you should be able to scour all your messages to retrieve the missing culprit – but be aware that if you are using Gmail you will need to do a separate search in each of the following All mail, Trash, and Spam.

You can search by the sender’s email address, subject or best of all a word or phrase in the missing email that will uniquely identify it as the one you are looking for.

Now we come to probably the trickiest case, where all your emails go out fine but are always rejected by a single receiver, no matter what you do – they just never get your messages. In this case, the first bit of detective work is to try and work out where the issue lies – try setting up an email account that is not on your domain, ie a free Gmail or Hotmail account and send the email from there – if they get it ok then you need to look closely at your email sending set up.?

In my experience, the issues have been around using a domain email like?[email protected]?when sending to an Outlook or Office365 client.?

First of all, make sure that your reply-to address is the same as your from address at your side – and do a test send. If that fails then the most likely culprit is your SPF record.

A Sender Policy Framework (SPF)?record?is a type of Domain Name System (DNS)?record?that can help to prevent email address forgery.?

Adding an?SPF record?can help prevent others from spoofing your domain.?

You can specify which mail servers are permitted to send an email on behalf of your domain. This prevents email address forgery.

If you don’t have an SPF record set up on your domain, then some receiving mail servers will automatically consign your email to the trash before it is even passed on.?

Adding the SPF record is a simple matter for your site hosting company, and you should ask them to check that you have one in place if you are having deliverability issues.