There are 2 main reasons why emails do not get through. More on the reasons below.



When your tenants do not receive your emails and you are not aware of it, what do you do? Anyhow, to resolve email delivery issue, this help section breaks down the events of email activity, the ways to ensure email delivery and highlights on email sending reputation.



6Stroage offers real time email activity to each of your tenants. You can find email activity on centralized lease page.



“A quick introduction: 6Storage has partnered with SendGrid, an email delivery platform. SendGrid holds a high delivery rate (99%) of transactional emails. Transactional Emails, in simple words are: order confirmation, password reset, email invoice/receipts etc.”



The emails you normally send are classified under 4 events. These 4 events of email activity are:


  • Delivered
  • Bounce
  • Blocked
  • Deferred



Delivered: The receiving (tenant’s) server accepts the message.



Bounce: The receiving server denies the message and also the email address sent to (tenant’s email address) is suppressed by SendGrid.

When you try to send email again to this recipient, SendGrid logs a repeat bounce because the recipient’s email address has been logged to the bounce suppression list.



"Suppression: The action where you do not send emails to tenants as they have either unsubscribed or their email server/provider has rejected your email."



If an email address is suppressed, SendGrid drops the email and displays a DROPPED status icon as in the pic below:





Dropped occurs under the following conditions: 1) The recipient email address has been bounced. 2) The recipient has marked your email as spam. 3) The recipient has unsubscribed. 


Bounces occur due to a misspelled or nonexistent email address. There are 2 levels of bounce: Soft and hard.



What is a soft bounce!



A soft bounce occurs when tenant’s valid email address is unable to receive mail at the moment. Once the issue causing the soft bounce is resolved by the network, the email is usually delivered to tenant’s inbox at a delayed result.



Soft bounces can happen if:


• The recipient’s mailbox is full


• The mail server is down



Note: SendGrid reports soft bounces as blocks in the metrics dashboard. However, SendGrid does not suppress recipient email address. 

This means you can send email again to the recipient (tenant)



What is a hard bounce!



Hard bounces result when tenant’s email address is permanently non-deliverable. In other words, hard bounce likely occurs because the email address does not exist. When you send email to an email account that does not exist you receive a standard “failure to deliver” message.



Hard bounces usually occur because:


• The email address is not a real account


• The email address is fake because it was a typo


• The user once had a real account but closed it


• The user once had a real account but abandoned it



Each time you get a hard bounce, your reputation score takes a hit. Email sending solutions urge you to have less than a 2% hard bounce rate. Imagine if your hard bounce rate jumps up to 5% - this might impact your reputation score. More on checking email sending reputation below.



Blocked: The receiving (tenant's) server rejects the message due to issues with your sending IP or message content. As the issue is message-specific, future messages to recipient email address are not suppressed. 



Deferred: The receiving server delays acceptance of the message.



When a tenant’s email has been deferred, the email activity on his centralized lease page shows a symbol as shown in the picture.





On such deferred events, SendGrid tries to deliver that email for up to 72 hours. If however the email to a tenant is deferred for more than 72 hours, the event changes to block, aka soft bounces. SendGrid records the soft bounce, but it does not suppress that email address if you mail it again. These deferrals happen when the recipient’s account is inactive or his inbox is full.



How To Ensure Email Delivery!



  • Check the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces.


  • If you’re using a Yahoo email address in the (From: line), replace it with email address of other email providers. Example: yourname@yourcompanydomain.com



Yahoo has strict email policies and email authentication methods to eliminate fraudulent and harmful messages. One of the authentication method used is DMARC i.e., Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.



“A quick intro on DMARC: Yahoo’s DMARC publishes a “p=reject” record, stating other DMARC compliant systems to reject mail from Yahoo users that isn’t genuinely originated from a Yahoo server. This affects mail with Yahoo addresses on the From: line.”



In simple terms, Yahoo’s DMARC policy proactively protects Yahoo users from email spam that mimics Yahoo users’ email addresses from other mail servers. This helps secure Yahoo users’ email identities from being used by unauthorized senders.



Undelivered Email


Undelivered emails can be the result of several factors but the most commonly known factors are:



1) The email address/mailbox does not exist

2) The recipient has marked the email as spam 

3) The recipient server has rejected the email and the email has been bounced

4) The recipient email address is on SendGrid suppression list and the email has been dropped



On Recent Email Activity



On recent events of emails not delivered to your tenant, we have collected the following information from SendGrid:



  • 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (lotrruturnoftheking@yahoo.com) [-9] - mta4499.mail.bf1.yahoo.com


  • 550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 5.1.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser e129si3066465ybe.111 – gsmtp (for errors with: user’s email)


  • 550 5.5.0 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable. [BN3NAM04FT046.eop-NAM04.prod.protection.outlook.com]



How To Check My Email Sending Reputation!



While a high sender score on these sites does not guarantee email delivery, here are 2 tools to check for your email sending reputation. Note: there is still a possibility of your emails reaching spam folder, or get blocked.



The 2 tools are:



Talos Intelligence



Talos Intelligence is a product of Cisco and provides you with the tools to check your reputation by ranking you as Good, Neutral, or Poor. Good means there is little or no threat activity. Neutral means your IP address or domain is within acceptable parameters, but emails may still be filtered or blocked. Poor means there is a problematic level of threat activity and you are likely to be filtered or blocked.



Reputation Authority



WatchGuard’s Reputation Authority helps protect business and government organizations from unwanted email and web traffic that contain spam, malware, spyware, malicious code, and phishing attacks. You can look up your IP address or domain, receive a reputation score from 0-100, and get the percentage of emails that were good versus bad.




Checklist:



  • Make sure your tenant’s email address contains no improper spaces or spelling errors.