Why isn't this person receiving my emails?

You can definitely check to see if VoterVoice delivered an email to a particular contact if they report they are not receiving them. In terms of exactly what happened, there is a limit to what you can tell from any system; but this article will go through what you can tell.

• Is the email address valid?
• Is the user subscribed?
• Did the email bounce?
• Was the email opened?

Is the Email Address Valid?

Go to  People > Contacts > Search Contacts and search for the user’s last name or email address. Click on the correct record below.

On the right side of the page with the contact’s information, you’ll see their email address. If there is red text to the side of it that says “invalid,” then the email in question has been flagged as bad. This occurs when the user’s email server bounces a message in such a way that it reports that the address simply doesn’t exist. VoterVoice does not attempt to make any further contact to invalid emails.

Is the User Subscribed?

Still in the user’s contact record from the previous step, look further down the right column until you see the user’s subscriber status. If it says “no,” then the user unsubscribed from receiving your emails and cannot be legally contacted unless they ask you to re-subscribe them.

If the user has a valid email and in subscribed, proceed to the Messaging Report.

Did the Email Bounce?

Go to Reports > Broadcasts > View Old Reports and click on the View Report link to the right of the email broadcast in question. You'll see a number of graphs in the reporting there; we're concerned with the first one: Messages Sent.

In Messages Sent, click on the Failed Emails portion of the graph and look for this person's email address. If they show up there, that means the message to them failed. Failures come in two types:

• HARD BOUNCE (their email likely doesn't exist)
• SOFT BOUNCE (likely either their inbox is full or the message was rejected as spam)

If their email is not there, proceed to the Opened Emails graph to the right.

Was the Email Opened?

Still in the Broadcasts Report, look at the Opened Emails Graph

First click on the Opened portion and download that list. Search for that person's email address in the resulting spreadsheet. If they're in there, that means that we delivered the email to them AND they opened it for certain. We can confirm that someone opened that email because they displayed the images when they did so.

If they don't show up there, then click on the Unknown portion and download that list. Search for that person's email address. If they're in there, that means that we still delivered the email to them, but we cannot tell if they've opened it or not. At this point, we can't tell much more about what happened. We've handed the email off to that person's email server, but what their email server did with it from there is outside of our control and knowledge.

Final Possibilities

If they don't show up in the Unknown portion of the Opened Emails graph, then they weren't sent the email at all. If this is the case, it is usually due to one of two cases:

• The email in question was a call-to-action email for an advocacy campaign, and the user is not a constituent of a targeted official.
• The email in question was sent using an advanced search to pare down the list of recipients, and the user did not match the search criteria.