Sending/receiving test campaigns
Why is it that sometimes you send a test message from the application to yourself or other team members in your company, and it doesn't arrive? Well, most of the time the email does arrive, but is filtered into a junk folder, or just takes a few minutes.
Sometimes though, it just never seems to get there. It can be incredibly frustrating, and worrying because you may think your own customers won't get your emails either. The system is sending them out - where are they going?
With love, from me to...me
The problem occurs when you are sending an email from the system to yourself, but defining the 'from' address to be the same domain as the 'to' address. So from clarkk@dailyplanet.com to loisl@dailyplanet.com for example. Some mail servers have built in brains that try to stop spam by checking for emails that claim to have been sent from the same domain as they are being sent to.
So the Daily Planet's email server might say:
This email for Lois says it is from Clark, but I didn't send any emails for Clark, so this must be a dastardly fake.
The email is stopped by the mail server, and never delivered or bounced back. The sending tool can't tell that is what happened, because no bounce message is sent. This problem will not affect your customers at all, because their email addresses are not at the same domain as your 'from' address.
How to make sure test emails get through
To prevent this problem, you just need to get your mail server administrator to specifically let emails from the email tool come through. Sometimes this is called 'whitelisting'. They will need to know the IP addresses we send from.
Another helpful hint since sometimes, it's your servers spam filter getting in the way is to not only check your spam folders but also try adjusting the blocks of text to see if any particular paragraph or set of words is causing the filter to be tripped.
Then you will be able to receive your test emails and make sure everything is perfect before sending out your campaign, always a good idea.
