Missing an Email? Don’t Stress — Address!
Email Deliverability - Justin Premick - February 6th, 2007 - PermalinkOne of the most frustrating things that can happen to a publisher is to be contacted by a subscriber who says:
| “I saw your latest newsletter on your website. It’s been up there for a week now. I’m a loyal reader and didn’t get a copy of it. Why the #@&!*%$ not?” |
If you let it.
Possible Causes of a Missing Email
There are a number of reasons that a subscriber might not be seeing your latest email in their inbox:
- The message may not have been placed in their inbox yet
- The subscriber’s address was undeliverable when the message was sent
- The subscriber’s email client program content-filtered the message
- The subscriber’s ISP content-filtered the message
- The subscriber overlooked or accidentally deleted the message
Obviously that last possible cause is not the first one you want to bring up; nobody likes being told that it’s their fault, especially right away.
The other causes, on the other hand, are not particularly familiar to the average subscriber. It’s not likely that they’re going to understand the difference between their address being undeliverable and a message being content-filtered.
Your reader wants the message and they want it now. And they don’t want this to ever happen again. You, on the other hand, recognize that as boring as some of that “techno-babble” about bounces and filters may be, it’s also important.
So how do you walk your subscriber through what happened, and what can be done to resolve the issue?
Start Simple
We use words like “permanent delivery failure” and “content filter,” but how many of your subscribers have heard those terms before?
The first step toward a solution is getting everyone to the same starting point. And that means explaining what’s going on in short, simple sentences.
It’s also useful to put yourself in your subscriber’s shoes: what do they need to have happen, and what information do they need to get there?
(Equally important: what information do they NOT need to get there? Don’t say more than you need to get your point across - you may raise more questions than you answer.)
Address Each Possibility, In Order
- Ask yourself when you sent the message, and how quickly after that the subscriber is contacting you. If it’s been less than a day, tell them to be patient - there’s a lot that goes on between when an ISP receives an email message and when that message appears in the recipient’s inbox. While that process is usually very fast, sometimes it’s not.
Have your subscriber check back with you if they still aren’t seeing that message 24 hours later.
- Check to see if the subscriber was undeliverable. If that’s the case, the subscriber needs to contact their ISP to find out why, or provide you an alternate email address.
- If the subscriber is not undeliverable, next have them check their “junk” folder to see if their email program content-filtered the message there.
- If the message is not in their junk folder, their ISP may have content-filtered the message (meaning they never placed it in the subscriber’s inbox). The subscriber should contact their ISP with:
- the message subject
- your “from” address
- the date the message was sent
to find out what was done with that message after the ISP received it.
If the subscriber still isn’t able to find the message, then you’ll want to ask them to make sure they didn’t accidentally delete the message.
Ultimately, if a subscriber continues to have trouble with their email address, they should provide you with an alternate one so that the issue doesn’t have an effect on future messages you send them.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Email Deliverability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
February 6th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Two things you can do to proactively prevent this problem is to ask subscriber’s for their primary email address and to let them know the email address you will be sending messages from in the future. Ask them to add the address to their contacts/address book and that should prevent their mail client from filtering the message.
Regards,
Graham Cox
February 6th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Graham, That’s a great idea. I think that works for subscribers who know what they’re doing. Yet most people are not so techie, nor are they inclined to know what you’re even talking about. Certainly doesn’t hurt to include instructions like this. I just find that most users are either not going to read the instructions or get lost un what to do with them.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Also ask the subscriber if anything has changed recently at their end?
February 7th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Hi Justin Premick;
Re: Email deliverability:
I’m new at this IM business, although I did know
some of the info. you gave. There were a couple of
things I did’t know. So thank you for a great
informative article.
————————
February 9th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Two things you can do to proactively prevent this problem is to ask subscriber’s for their primary email address and to let them know the email address you will be sending messages from in the future. Ask them to add the address to their contacts/address book and that should prevent their mail client from filtering the message.