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Diagnosing Email Delivery Issues
Introduction
myClubhouse has an important feature that you should be checking regularly: Email Delivery Reports.
This page can be found under the Email menu on your myClubhouse site:
Email > Browse Delivery Reports
or at the address:
https://<<your_myClubhouse_URL>>/Mail/Delivery/BrowseReports
Important: By default the page will only show emails from the past 30 days. Please use the Send Date filter to select a different range (up to 90 days).
In This Guide
What Do the Reports Tell You?
The reports come directly from our mail server's database. There will be exactly one row per email sent containing various details.
In this case we define one email as being sent to one recipient email address e.g. if you sent the same email to 100 users, each with one email address, that would count as 100 emails and there would be 100 rows in the report.
Available Columns
Tx ID (Transaction ID): A unique code assigned to the email.
From Address: the verified sending address from which all email is sent from your myClubhouse site e.g. littlewhingeingltc@myclubhouse.co.uk.
Recipient Address: the email address in the “To” field of the email.
Send Time: The date and time stamp at which the email was sent.
Delivery Time: The date and time stamp at which the email was received by the recipient’s mail server.
Last Modified Time: This is the date and time stamp that goes together with the current latest Status label. E.g. an email may be opened multiple times, so if the Status is “Opened”, Last Modified Time will tell you the most recent time the email was opened.
Status: The current latest status of the email. See below for more details.
Remarks: Any message sent back from the recipient mail server.
Size: The size (in KB) of the email sent.
The Status Column
The Status column has 11 possible labels and an email may transition through various statuses but will only display the latest status as follows:
Processed - An email gets a “Processed” status when our mail server receives the email request with valid parameters. The status is automatically changed to ‘sent’ if the delivery of the email to the recipient’s mailing server is successful.
Sent - Message has been received and acknowledged by the recipient mail server but no Open message has come through. Note: email may have been opened without images downloaded but may equally be sitting in a spam folder on the recipient's webmail server where they would not necessarily know to look for it.
Open - Message has been opened by the recipient (this only works if the recipient downloads images, otherwise it will still display ‘Sent’).
Click - recipient has clicked on a link in the message (we do not have click tracking switched on*, therefore you will not see this one)
Unsubscribe - recipient has clicked on an unsubscribe link, provided by the mail server, in the email (we do not have unsubscribe links switched on**, however, some mail providers (e.g. Yahoo and Gmail) provide their own unsubscribe links, therefore we cannot prevent recipients from unsubscribing in this way.
Our mail server will not attempt to deliver any future emails to this recipient. The email address will now be placed on the Suppression List meaning all future emails will be dropped until it has been removed from the list.Bounce - the email did not get through to the recipient (usually due to a bad email address or because their mailbox was full, we don't normally see this as we normally see either Soft Bounce or Hard Bounce)
Soft Bounce - If the delivery of the email failed due to a temporary failure, the email is said to be soft bounced. Some of these failure reasons can be:
The mailbox was full (the user was over their quota).
The recipient's server was down.
The email was too large for the recipient's inbox.
The recipient server is currently not accepting emails from the sending IP address.
Our mail server does retry delivery of emails that have failed due to soft bounce. But, it is always recommended to keep your bounce rate below 5%, as the higher the bounce rate, the more negative your reputation with the ISPs (negative reputations lead to blacklisting).
Hard Bounce - If the delivery of the email fails due to permanent failure, the email is said to be hard bounced. Some of these failure reasons can be:
The email address doesn't exist.
The recipient domain doesn't exist. For instance - your emails to info@sample.com are going to fail if the domain 'sample.com' doesn't exist.
Our mail server will not attempt to deliver any future emails to this recipient. The email address will now be placed on the Suppression List meaning all future emails will be dropped until it has been removed from the list.
Spam - The recipient marked the email as spam. It is not clear if this has to be a conscious decision by the recipient or whether it sometimes happens automatically. The email address will go straight on the Suppression List and will no longer receive any email from you unless you request it be taken off.
Invalid - Email address is syntactically incorrect.
Dropped - The recipient email address is on the Suppression List so the mail host did not attempt to send this email. An email address will be on the Suppression List because the recipient has either clicked on the “unsubscribe” link, received a bounce, or reported an email as spam in the past. Our mail server will never send email to this address again unless you request it to be taken off the suppression list.
* Click tracking changes your link addresses to redirect via our mail server's click tracking processor and therefore reduces your recipients' trust in your links; for this reason, we have switched off click tracking.
** Unsubscribe links provided by the mail server would cause confusion as myClubhouse already provides an unsubscribe link on every email; for this reason, we have switched off the mail server's unsubscribe links but we cannot prevent the recipient’s mail provider (e.g. Gmail or Yahoo) from displaying their own unsubscribe links.
What to Do if you Detect a Problem
If a user complains that they are not receiving emails, first check the Delivery Reports for their email address(es). If you see the following Status:
Open - everything is fine, they have received and opened the email.
Sent - the email may be in their spam folder. Ask them to check on their webmail e.g. https://mail.yahoo.com, not just on their local email application, e.g. Outlook or their phone's Mail program, as often the emails which are trapped in spam folders will not be downloaded to their device and will remain only on the server.
Bounce/Invalid - check the Remarks column for further information and act accordingly. Check you have the correct email address. If the remarks mention the IP being on a blacklist, please use the Service Desk (https://simmetrics.atlassian.net/servicedesk) to report it and we will contact our mail server provider to have it removed from the blacklist.
Spam/Dropped - If you are sure the email address is correct and the user definitely wants to receive your emails then please click the button “Remove from Suppression” and monitor to see if the problem has been fixed.
This will take the email address off our mail server's suppression list so future emails will not get dropped. Unfortunately, our connection to the mail server will not tell us if the email address is currently on the suppression list, so even if it has already been removed, you will still see the button.
If the email address is incorrect, please delete it or correct it for all users in your system who have that email address assigned.
Can't Find the Email Address - no email has been sent to this address. Please check which Member Lists you sent to and whether the user appears in the lists (Email > Member List Manager). Also, check whether they have unsubscribed from the Mail Category (Admin > Settings > Consents & Agreements > Messaging Consents > Analyse > Search on user's name).
How Often to Check
Good housekeeping is essential for high email deliverability. We recommend you check the Email Deliverability Report at least once a week for any sending problems. This way you are likely to detect a problem before the user discovers they have missed out on emails or events.
We suggest putting in a 7-day filter as shown (the maximum range is 90 days ago):
Also filter on negative Statuses as shown:
Click "Apply Filter" to see your report.
Then click "Save" to save the View for future weekly checks as shown:
What Next?
It is up to you to check your reports regularly. We suggest you agree a member of your committee or staff who will take on responsibility for this role. We are planning future improvements as follows:
Linking deliverability reports to the Sent Emails table, so the email content and deliverability can be matched.
Automatically notifying you of bounces, spam reports, etc.