When sending out emails via Certain, you may receive reports that registrants are not receiving emails from the event. If this happens, there are a few items to review and steps you may need to take to ensure that emails are received.
Troubleshooting Steps
- Go to the Registration within the Event and look to see that there is a history record of the email being sent.
- Click on the History Record to see additional info and ensure the TO address is correct.
- Copy down the Date/Time, the FROM address, the TO address, and the Subject.
- If there is a Record, it indicates that the email triggered correctly and was sent out from the Event.
- If there is no History Record of the Email going out, then there is an issue with how the email is being sent.
- Check the area you are sending the email from to ensure it is properly set up to send the email out (Form Confirmation, Form Logic, Custom Reg Status, Scheduled Email, etc.).
History Record Shows Email Was Sent - Registrant Still Did Not Receive
- If a History Record shows but the registrant still did not receive the email, then it may be getting marked as Spam or Quarantined by their Email Server.
- There are multiple factors that receiving email servers consider when filtering out Spam or Malicious emails, but the main areas checked are the FROM address and the Email Content.
FROM Address
- FROM Address (example: Jeff@CertainTest.com)
- The Receiving email server will reach out to the FROM Address Domain (CertainTest.com) and ask if the email actually came FROM them (SPF/DKIM/DMARC security checks).
- If these security checks fail, then the email is weighed heavily towards being counted as spam. The weight this is given depends on what your Domain's (CertainTest.com) email security settings are for those checks (DMARC: none, quarantine, reject - DKIM: strict, relaxed).
Email Content
- Spam filters look for things like keywords or phrases (Free Gift, Act Now, etc.)
- Large number of Links
- Broken HTML
- Complex HTML
- JavaScript
- Many Others
Note: If an email is Bounced back or Blocked by a receiving email server, the event contact (REPLYTO address) will receive an email notifying you that the email was "Undeliverable". If the email is sent to their Spam folder or Quarantined by their Server, no email will be received by the Event Contact.
SPF/DKIM/DMARC Failure
If your emails are not passing the security checks or are getting bounced back because they failed DMARC checks, then you need to review the FROM address that you are using. You would have two options:
- Ensure all emails sent have a FROM address with a certain.com domain (event-information@certain.com).
The REPLYTO address will still be the event contact and the FROM Name will be the Contact Name.
- Reach out to Certain Support with information on the Domain your FROM emails use.
Configuring your Account to use the Default Certain FROM address
1. Navigate to Account Settings > Implementation > Security Settings.
2. Under Other Settings, select Use event-information@certain.com next to Set Email FROM value to:
3. Click Save.
Using Your Own FROM Address
If you are using your own FROM address, you need to make sure that the email passes security checks (SPF/DKIM/DMARC). To do this, you will need to reach out to Certain Support to get the information needed to set this up properly. The Support team will provide you with 3 DNS entries that you would need to make/add to your FROM addresses Domain. You would then apply these entries to your DNS host to alert your email server that emails sent from that address are legitimate, allowing them to pass SPF/DKIM/DMARC security checks.
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