Why are my emails not being received?

All Raisely campaigns have emails for when people make donations, receive donations and sign up. It's important these emails make it to supporters, but sometimes they end up in a spam folder or are outright rejected by the recipient.

Common reasons for not receiving an email 🔗

Time

Despite popular belief, emails aren't actually instant. It takes time for the email to be created, sent, accepted, processed and then placed in your inbox. Generally, emails from Raisely should be arriving within 1-5 minutes, anything beyond 15-30 minutes indicates there might be a problem. These small delays can be created by Raisely if the platform is generating and sending a high volume of emails, but it can equally be caused by the receiving mail server being busy.

So, if someone hasn't received an email, take into consideration the time it takes for the email to reach its destination.

Organisation not Verified

Your organisation must be verified before Raisely systems will send emails. This is a precaution against misuse of Raisely services. If you see red notice on the left of your admin panel that says Verify your email then your organisation has not completed verification and cannot send emails.

Mistyped Email Addresses

Sometimes, a donor or fundraiser will mistype their email. We often see mistakes like gmail.con  or hotmail.com.au which look like correct emails but will always bounce.

Junk Folder

Depending on the email server and it's configuration, some Raisely emails may land in the junk folder, so if a user is missing an email always get them to check their Junk/Spam folders to see if it was automatically routed there. The reason for Raisely emails going to junk/spam folders vary widely. Variations on the receiving email server, it's configuration, the content of the email and any number of other factors all contribute to what happens to an email. 

If you are finding all of your Raisely emails landing in junk/spam, read more about Improving Email Deliverability below.

Aggressive Corporate Filters

Some companies will have aggressive spam filters on their emails. If the customer has an email that isn't a common email domain (like gmail.com, hotmail.com, live.com, me.com, icloud.com), there's a chance it's stuck in spam filters. So check the domain, and if it's a larger corporation or government institution it might have been rejected by the receiving email server.

Troubleshooting Steps

Based on all of these factors, here are some simple steps if an email hasn't been received:

1. Has it been longer than 5-minutes? It's best to give the email some time to reach the destination email server.
2. Confirm the spelling of the email - is it correct? Double-check the email and the domain name (eg. gmail.com) is correct.
3. Is the email in the spam/junk folder? Sometimes innocuous emails can land in the spam/junk folder, so it's a good idea to double-check it's not in there.
4. Does the receiving server have any aggressive email filters? This can be a tricky question, in a lot of cases users aren't technical and aren't aware of their organisation's infrastructure. But you can try to make an educated guess based on the domain.
5. Still not sure? Contact support, we are happy to trace the email and see if we can spot any issues from our side!

What can Raisely Support see? 🔗

It's a common question we get asked: "Did the email arrive?". It's important to understand the technical limitations of email transmission technology and the amount of information we can get. 

When an email is sent, a brief amount of communication occurs between the sending email server and the receiving email server. 

Think of it like they say hello to each other and ask if it's OK to send the email. When Raisely sends the email, and the receiving email server says "Yep I will accept this email" we get a copy and record that reply from the receiving email server. This is the extent of information we get from our side, what happens to the email after the receiving email server accepts it - we can't see. 

Did it get routed to spam/junk folders? Did it end up in their inbox? From a technical perspective, it's impossible for us to tell what happens to the email. However, the receiving email server (depending on the configuration) may have a log of detailed information about what happened to the email and why it was placed in one folder or another.

If the email is outright rejected, we get a copy of that message as well as the error why the receiving email server rejected it.

What about email opened/clicked data?

This is some special tracking data that gets added to the email and allows the detection of such events. 

Note that this isn't part of email transmission, it's an external tracking service. This data isn't always 100% reliable, some email servers/software and browsers can strip and stop this tracking data from being triggered - much like tracking/analytics data when visiting a website can be stopped.

Improving Email Deliverability 🔗

By default, Raisely emails are sent "via" the raiselysite.com domain name. In your email client, it might look like:
[Your Organisation] via raiselysite.com or raiselysite.com On Behalf Of [Your Organisation].

We effectively send the emails from our domain but say they're from you. We do this to make it simple for your campaign to go live. This is a totally valid way to transmit an email and is a widely used method of sending emails, but some strict email servers and configurations can move these emails to junk/spam folders.

If you would like to update your SPF record to include our sending servers, please add "include:mailgun.org" to your existing SPF record.

If you're seeing consistent issues with emails being received by supporters, you can verify your domain with Raisely. This allows us to send emails from your domain directly, not via Raisely.  If you're sending to government-controlled email systems (for example schools) and these are not being received, we recommend validating your domain so we can send through it.

You need to contact support to start this process. We will supply MX, TXT and DNS records you will need to add to your domain, so make sure you've got access to your domain's DNS settings before starting the process.