Contact Not Receiving Emails
Diagnose why a specific contact isn't getting emails
Contact Not Receiving Emails
When a specific contact reports not receiving your emails, there are several possible causes. This guide walks through a systematic diagnosis process to identify and resolve the issue.
Step 1: Check Contact Status
Navigate to Contacts and search for the contact by email address. Check their status:
- Active — The contact is eligible to receive emails. Proceed to step 2.
- Unsubscribed — The contact has opted out. They must re-subscribe to receive emails again.
- Bounced — A previous send resulted in a hard bounce and the contact was suppressed. If the issue has been resolved on their end, you can manually reactivate the contact, but proceed with caution.
- Complained — The contact previously marked your email as spam. Sending to them again risks your sender reputation.
Step 2: Check the Global Suppression List
Go to Organization Settings > Global Suppression and search for the email address. If the contact appears here, no emails will be sent to them regardless of their contact status. Review the suppression reason before deciding whether to remove them.
Step 3: Check Campaign Targeting
If the contact is active and not suppressed, verify they are included in the campaign's target audience. Open the campaign and check:
- Is the contact a member of the targeted list or segment?
- Is the contact excluded by an exclusion segment?
- If the campaign uses engagement-based targeting, does the contact meet the criteria?
Step 4: Check Frequency Caps
If your organization has frequency caps configured, the contact may have been skipped because they already received the maximum number of emails within the cap window. Check the contact's activity feed to see recent sends and compare against your frequency cap settings.
Step 5: Review the Contact's Activity Feed
On the contact's detail page, review the activity feed for recent email events. Look for:
- Sent events — If the email shows as sent, the issue is on the receiving end (spam folder, inbox filtering).
- Soft bounce events — Temporary delivery failures that may resolve on retry. Mailnaptic retries soft bounces automatically.
- No events — If there is no send event for the expected campaign, the contact was not included in the send for one of the reasons above.
Step 6: Ask the Contact to Check Their End
If the email was sent successfully, the issue may be on the recipient's side. Ask them to check their spam/junk folder, search for your sending domain, and add your from address to their contacts or safe senders list. Corporate email environments may have additional filtering that the recipient's IT department controls.
Step 7: Send a Test Email
From the campaign builder, send a test email directly to the contact's address. If the test arrives, the issue may be specific to the campaign targeting. If the test also fails, the problem is likely DNS, reputation, or recipient-side filtering.