Why do some of my email messages not make it through to the recipient

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Revision as of 18:12, 12 August 2015 by SPederson (talk | contribs)
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There may be a number of reasons that an email message does not make it to the intended recipient. A couple of the more common reasons are discussed here. Close inspection of the “bounced” email may lead you to discover which reason below may apply to your situation.

Reason: The recipients email message box may be full, the email address may be incorrect, or may not exist any more.

Solution: Contacting the specific recipient to verify the email address would be appropriate in situations like this.


Reason: An ISP (Internet Service Provider) may block a sender. Due to increased spam, many ISPs have started to limit the number of emails coming from one sender that is allowed to flow through their email servers in a given time period.

Solution: One solution would be to contact the recipients ISP and have them add you to their safe sender or white list. Another option would be for us to try to work with them to find out what their receiving requirements are and to set our outgoing mail server settings accordingly. However, the problem with this is they may change it unexpectedly and mail may get stopped again. Our preference is to have the ISP always allow email from your domain or from our mail server IP addresses. The addresses are: 64.90.67.154-156. These IP's would need to be added to your member’s mail server to always allow mail from these addresses.


Reason: A recipient may require that all senders verify their validity before acceptance of their email. In this situation, the recipient actually received the email but will not open the email until it has been personally verified by the sender. This is another spam-fighting tactic which requires a personal email response from the sender.

Solution: The sender (you) should comply with the personal request to verify your validity by following the instructions included in the email. This procedure is something that only needs done one time and then future emails should be accepted without further intervention. An initial mass email may return a number of these requests but should subside after completing each request for verification.


Reason: An email server may temporarily experience communication difficulties that result in an inability to receive email messages.

Solution: Sending this particular email to this particular recipient another time would be appropriate. The email server may be ready to accept messages again and you may not experience any further troubles.

If you have further questions on these issues or concerns that are not addressed here, please contact customer support.