Why are my emails not getting delivered?

In this article, you can read about why some emails sometimes don’t get received by the recipient and how to prevent this.

When using RecMan, it makes sense to send emails to customers, candidates, contact persons, etc., via the email service in RecMan. When using this, it is important to take steps to make sure emails arrive where and when they should. In RecMan, you have three main solutions to make sure most emails arrive at their designation:

1. Adding our servers to your domain’s SPF record. See SPF for more information on how to do so and validate the setup.
2. Setting up an email integration for each co-worker. See the Setup and use of the email integration for more information.
3. Setting up a general SMTP server for your RecMan system. See SMTP for more information on setup in RecMan, what to communicate to your email service provider and testing.
4. Adding another level of security to emails sent from your system with DKIM. See DKIM for more information about setup, validation and testing.

Spam filter

Once the above steps have been taken and emails still are not delivered or end up in junk/spam folders, it is important to understand how a spam filter works. A spam filter has many criteria to decide which emails should make it into the Inbox. The sum of these criteria is what determines which emails are blocked completely, put into junk/spam folders, or actually put in the inbox.

Some of the criteria are described here:

1. The subject field – A short and descriptive subject is important. Avoid irrelevant, unclear and unprofessional subjects, like capitalized letters, numbers and extensive symbol usage. This can trigger a spam filter to trigger.
2. The email metadata – The spam filter will know if you know the recipient or not through information in the Metadata. This is also where the SPF information is kept. A check is also performed to see if your email address is on the recipient’s contact list. Should emails not arrive, having the recipient add you to a contact list should help.
3. IP address– If the IP address you are sending from has been flagged as spam previously, emails you send may not arrive. If a user of RecMan sends out mass emails, for instance, a lot of recipients may flag our servers as spam servers.

   Warning

   When sending emails to several candidates or company contacts, make sure you never send to more than 50 in one go. This may cause issues for you and other RecMan users.

4. Content and format – The emails' content should be clean. Too much excess information or pictures may trigger spam filters. Avoid colors, words in all caps lock and excessive usage of exclamation marks, for instance.
5. Code – Every email contains code, and emails sent from RecMan contain HTML code in many cases. Sloppy code, tags all over the place or formatting taken from, for instance, MS Word can trigger this.

Keep these points in mind when sending emails from RecMan. Neither RecMan nor you can change what spam filters look for, so taking some precautions before sending is advised.