Diagnosing Email Sending Problems

Email is a necessary part of doing business. When the person who you are sending the email to doesn’t receive the message, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Which email program are you using to send the email?
  Webmail email clients are pretty good at sending the email or telling you when you have a problem. Other email programs such as Outlook or mobile apps could have an “Outbox” folder where messages sit in a purgatory where you think you have sent them but they haven’t yet left your computer.
• Are your messages going into your recipient’s spam folder or are they not being received at all?
  Even the best of us don’t check our spam folder on a daily basis. It’ good to remind the person to look for your message in there. If they find it, then they might be able to add your address to their contacts or setup a filter to never send spam from you into their spam folder.
• Are the messages getting saved in your sent folder?
  Perhaps you were distracted and didn’t actually click the Send button before closing the compose email window. Having a copy of the Sent message will help with this next point…
• Did you send the message to the correct email address?
  If you copy/pasted the recipient’s email, maybe you missed the first or last character. (think .co instead of .com) If you typed it by hand, maybe there is a typo in the outgoing address. Go letter by letter to make sure you spelled the To address correctly.
• Did you get any bounce back from the email server?
  The bounce message might not come for a few minutes. It is great when you get a bounce because the reason for the bounce is within the message. It could be anything from you sending to a non-existent address (a To address typo), the sender’s account is over quote or suspended, or the receiving server’s anti-spam system kicked it back.

Hopefully these questions will help you narrow in on where the problem lies.