any ideas why my emails are not being recieved, but are not bouncing?

Question

I have been trying CiviMail to send emails with CiviCRM 4.6.9. and drupal 7. When I send mails using the mail system not many of them reach the destination mailbox. They are marked as delivered by the mail reports, but only a few are marked as opened. When I check with the individual users they are not getting my emails, I am also not receiving bounces. I have checked and our domain has not been blacklisted. If I send emails from my own email program they generally all get through.

Any suggestions as to why my emails are not getting through when sent from Civimail?

Answer 1

There's two questions here - "Why am I not showing any bounces?" and "why isn't my email arriving?". I'll try to answer the first one here.

• The nature of SMTP (the Internet email protocol) is that a message will be relayed from server to server many times before it reaches its destination. The first 90 seconds of this video demonstrates this.
• CiviMail can only know if it successfully delivered to the FIRST server. In many situations, that first e-mail will accept ALL emails, and rely on later servers to bounce the message. However, since the later servers don't connect directly to CiviMail, they can't report a bounce directly. Instead, they send a "bounce message" via e-mail to the sender. You've probably seen a bounce message yourself if you've mis-typed an email address and tried sending to an address that doesn't exist.
• To address this, most configurations of CiviMail require that you set up an email account specifically to catch bounce messages. See this documentation on setting up bounce processing. There are also some gory details here.
• If you have NOT successfully configured a bounce processing address, or you haven't enabled the "Fetch Bounces" scheduled job (Administer menu > System Settings > Scheduled Jobs), your mailing reports will always show zero bounces (excepting advanced configurations like a SOAP Return Channel).

Answer 2

Your ability to diagnose this is going to be proportional to your access to the server you are using... Sending mail is sometimes a little magic...

A few suggestions... Do you have DKIM keys on your domain? That will help you get through some spam filters at gmail and the likes... You should also not manage your own mail server... it is better left to specialized places...

I use SendGrid... and it's pretty easy to set up some dkim keys to their sender keys so that email sent through them are verified to your domain... They can also help you do the diagnostic with their tools...

Their free tier is awesome ... Check them out...

Now if you need more help with your current set-up... you will need to give us more info on what you use to send your mail...

Hope this helps...