Understanding Email Delivery

The key to understanding email delivery is to understand the players involved. Essentially, there are 4...

Sender: The person who crafts the email and hits 'send'.

Sender's email server: The server that accepts the email and sends it on to the recipient's email server.

Recipient's email server: In charge of accepting the incoming email and then delivering it to the final recipient.

Recipient: The final person who actually gets the email in their inbox.

There are many reasons why an email might not have been received. Here are a few...

• The email is considered too 'spammy' (due to header or content) and is rejected by either the sending email server or receiving email server
• The receiving email server has blocked or blacklisted that particular sender
• The end recipient has marked a previous email from this sender as 'SPAM' and the sending email server does not send the email on
• The recipient has turned on a filter in their inbox and is routing their emails respective to their filter

The diagram below best describes the control we have as a sending provider (see orange highlighted area). We can only guarantee and record the delivery of the email to the recipient's email server. Once that occurs, we consider an email successfully delivered. We do not have any insight or control on whether or not the recipient's email server successfully placed the email in the recipient's inbox.