How to prevent emails from not being received?

How to prevent emails from not being received?

Email has become an indispensable communication tool. Dutch people receive on average about a hundred emails per week, ranging from personal to business correspondence. Email’s popularity is partly due to its reliable delivery and receipt. After all, physical mail is exposed to more risks. However, sending and receiving emails doesn’t always go smoothly. When emails appear not to be sent or received, most users immediately contact their ISP. From experience, I know the problem often lies not with the ISP but with the end user. Therefore, I’d like to go through several common scenarios.

Start at the source

Are you expecting an email but haven’t received it? Many people encounter this situation and immediately wonder if they’ve missed more emails. The most common reason for not receiving an email is that it was never sent in the first place. So always first check whether the email was actually sent by the sender’s mail server. This can easily be verified through your IT department or system administrator. When you’re waiting for an email and minutes pass, this doesn’t always mean the email isn’t on its way. Email isn’t an instant messaging medium, meaning there can be a delay between sending and receiving – sometimes up to ten minutes. While uncommon, sometimes you just need to be patient.

The value of mailer daemon

When you send an email, it’s delivered to the recipient’s mail server. Upon arrival, the email might be rejected. You’ll then receive a ‘mailer daemon’ message in return. These are the familiar notifications indicating the email couldn’t be delivered. People tend to ignore these messages because their content seems difficult to understand at first glance. However, I recommend paying attention to them as they contain valuable information. There are many different messages – I’ll discuss the three most common ones.

First, email addresses are often misspelled. Just one wrong character can cause the problem. Always check the address carefully and ensure you’ve entered the correct top-level domain. You might have entered a .com address when it should actually be .nl. Another common cause lies with the recipient. When the receiving mail server has reached its limit (like a full hard drive), it can’t accept more emails. In this case too, a ‘mailer daemon’ message is automatically returned. Remember that the recipient has no knowledge of your sending attempt. The third reason is that the receiving mail server identifies the email as spam. This is the last thing you want, so here are some tips to prevent it.

Ensure your email isn’t marked as spam

In haste, you might have skipped filling in the email subject line. This seems harmless but increases the chance of the email being marked as spam. Always include a subject line. You might also sometimes want to quickly email a document without accompanying text. Empty messages similarly have a higher chance of being seen as spam. Finally, whatever program or service you use to send emails, they all offer extensive formatting options. Be aware that your formatting (often in HTML) should be proportional to your message’s text content. An email consisting mostly of HTML formatting also risks being filtered as spam.

In a follow-up article, I’ll delve deeper into reading Internet Mail Headers and list several more Mailer Daemon messages. How can you tell where an email got stuck?

By: Justin Rondeboom