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Troubleshoot email issues

If a user is not receiving their form email alerts, there are different issues that could be causing this. Please always go through the following steps in this order to troubleshoot email issues:

1. Is Email connected?

Find the user's form. If they do not have an email address connected in the Connect tab, educate them on how to connect an email address to receive form email alerts. 

2. Have payments been received?

If the user is accepting payments through their form, check if the Payment Received column has Yes next to any of the responses. If it says no payment have been received, make sure the user has IPN enabled in their PayPal account (see here for more info on how to troubleshoot payment issues: Troubleshooting Payment Issues (Internal). If Require Payment is turned on, the user receives an email only if a payment was received and PayPal updates the payment status to Payment Received: Yes.

3. Are our emails going to spam?

  1. Go to Sparkpost Dashboard and log in with Ben's account (login is in LastPass).
  2. Navigate to Reports > Message Events and enter the user's address.
  3. Use the More Filters option to search through more than just the last hour. You can also search for specific events.
  4. Filter by Delivered & Initial Open. If the list only shows Delivered that means the user's email host received our emails and the emails got filtered out after delivery and they may be sitting in their Spam/Junk folder. Send this Macro to the user:​

Thanks for writing in. I'm very sorry to hear you're having trouble with that.

I just checked the delivery report for emails going from no-reply@powr.io to [ENTER USER EMAIL HERE] and it looks like all messages have been successfully delivered to your email server.

Have you checked your spam/junk folders yet? If you find our emails there, make sure to mark them as 'not spam' and add us to your Contacts to prevent our emails from being filtered out again.

If you don't find our emails in your spam folder, try adding powr.io to your safe senders list as well as adding no-reply@powr.io to your Contacts, then submit a test and see if that comes through.

Let me know if that helps!

4. Is the user blacklisted?

  1. Navigate to Lists > Suppressions and enter the user's email address.
  2. If the address shows up in the list, this means the user hard-unsubscribed from all POWr emails via their email service.
  3. Delete the Suppression List entry and inform the user that this happened because they unsubscribed not just from a campaign but from all emails sent from @powr.io.

Send the user the following Macro:

Hi there, So sorry that is happening. It looks like your email host for [ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS] has rejected a bunch of our emails. I have whitelisted the address from our end, but to ensure that you can receive emails from us, please follow these steps:

  1. Add no-reply@powr.io to your email's safe senders list and Contacts. 
  2. Submit a test through your form. 
  3. Check your inbox and spam folder. If you find the email in your spam folder, make sure to mark it as 'not spam'.

Please know that you can always view all form responses in your Form Response Dashboard: https://www.powr.io/knowledge-base/view-and-export-form-responses

I hope this helps. Let me know if you keep experiencing any issues!

5. Sparkpost message status != 'delivered'

If the status says 'delayed', 'generation rejection', or 'rejected' but the user is not on the blacklist, they may simply not have had enough bounced messages to be on the blacklist yet. Have them do the following:

  • Add no-reply@powr.io to Contacts
  • Add @powr.io to the whitelist
  • Add our sending domain and hostname to the whitelist (or have them provide those details to their email host). You can find those details in Sparkpost, here.

 

FIX: BROKEN_ATTACHMENT (original: https://help.powr.io/hc/article_attachments/115025216967/sending-ip.png)

6. Is email being triggered?

If the Sparkpost Dashboard gives us no data for the user's email address, look for anything unusual in the user's email. Does it have special symbols in the email address? Does the form's title include any code or weird characters? Anything that might confuse our system because of characters that interfere with our code can cause the emails to not be triggered. In that case, suggest that the user remove any special characters and try again.

7. Is the Sender Name customized properly?

A user's Sender Name shouldn't contain any @ or email. This should just be a simple business name or just their own name.

FIX: BROKEN_ATTACHMENT (original: https://help.powr.io/hc/article_attachments/360101090213/mceclip0.png)

instead of

FIX: BROKEN_ATTACHMENT (original: /attachments/token/H0bAMd6rQdrZfz7d0n7yu4azE/?name=inline-2063218368.png)

BONUS: Understanding Sparkpost's Bounce Codes

Sparkpost has decent documentation on all of their bounce reasons available in their Help Center. They're often not very easy to find, so it's best to just copy/paste the error code and google it.

For example, if the bounce reason says: "554 5.7.1 – Recipient address was suppressed due to customer policy", you should find this article that explains in detail what this bounce reason means.

Understanding the bounce reason is often helpful for pointing a user in the right direction (i.e. "You unsubscribed" vs. "Your email host rejected our email because they think it is spam").