How can I troubleshoot emails not getting received?

There are many things that can get in the way of your users receiving emails sent from the system. Here's how to troubleshoot the most common.

Far and away the most likely reason is the email got misfiled into their spam or junk mail folder. Most of the major email providers know to trust our messages, but automatic filters are also controlled by the actions of the recipient, so if they have marked something similar to a LocallyGrown email in the past, then it becomes more likely that your messages might also get categorized as junk. There's nothing you can do to check this for them, but you should ask them if they've gone in and looked in their junk mail folder.

Sometimes they have marked a LocallyGrown email as spam themselves. Either they did it on accident, or they don't understand what marking it as junk really means. Or maybe they understand perfectly well and don't want to receive your mails anymore. In that case, though, they're probably not complaining to you about not receiving them any more, so we'll let them go. Thanks to the Federal law known as the CAN-SPAM Act, most email providers record when a person marks mail as junk, and then report that back to the sending servers. If the sender sends future messages to that person, then the email provider can (and will) block all email coming from that server. So, it doesn't matter if a person marked it as junk accidentally or not -- that person must be immediately taken off the list. When my servers get a junk mail complaint, the recipient's account is immediately set to inactive, and they will no longer receive mailings or be able to order at your market. This has to be done to prevent the actions of a single AOL user (for example) getting LocallyGrown blocked for all the thousands of other AOL users in the system. There is no tolerance from them, so that means there is no tolerance from me. If you go into the recipient's LocallyGrown account and see that it is set to inactive, this is probably why. You can mark them as active again, and then send me an email so that I can release a secondary block at the server. I can do this once, but if they continue to file complaints with their provider, I cannot continue to release that block. Gmail does not participate in this law, so you can suggest that your customers switch to a gmail address if they keep marking your messages as spam.

A user can also unsubscribe from emails by clicking on an unsubscribe link automatically added to the bottom of every email. This is also a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act. This will also set their LocallyGrown account to inactive. There is a confirmation step they have to go through, so it's much harder to do this by accident. Generally if they unsubscribe, they meant to unsubscribe and no longer want your emails. If they change their mind, you can set their account back to active status. In about a week, they ought to start getting mailings again.

If the user has a bad email address on their LocallyGrown account (they mis-typed it, or changed their address but didn't change their account), or if their email provider's servers go down for a while, the emails will bounce back to my servers. When that happens, I automatically set their LocallyGrown account to not receive mailings. If you go in and see that the account is active, but not set to receive mailings, this is probably why. Reset it and ask them to verify their email address. Once they fix it, they should start getting mailings again.

Finally, they can set their account to not receive mailings themselves on the Your Account page of your market. If they have done this and forgotten about it, you can just reset it and they'll be good to go.

Some email providers (especially colleges and businesses) have their own filters and blocks that can delete mail before it can even get to the recipient. In my experience, good email can often get blocked with the bad, and the IT staff sees that as acceptable "collateral damage" in the war against spam. In that case, it's between the recipient and their email provider. There is nothing you can do, other than suggest they get a gmail or some other more public email account they can use.

My servers do log everything, so I can go back about ten days and see if a message got sent, if it bounced back, or if it was blocked due to a spam complaint or unsubscription. It is time consuming, so I'd appreciate it if you go through the above checks first. If you do need me to take a look, be sure you give me the exact email address I am looking for. The system adds comments to the customer's account whenever something triggers me cutting off their emails, so you can see the reason by looking at their account details.