Troubleshooting Pitcher Multichannel emails (RTE)
Pitcher Multichannel allows users to send email notifications to their customers. Although emails are a reliable way to communicate on the internet, sometimes you can face issues with email delivery and tracking features that may arise for several reasons. This document will walk you through the common problems related to Pitcher Multichannel emails and how to solve them.
Pitcher Multichannel emails are also known as Rep-Triggered Emails (RTEs), Approved Emails.
The Pitcher Multichannel email flow
Pitcher Multichannel emails are eventually sent via Mailgun and not from the Pitcher Server directly. A typical email flow for Multichannel email looks like this:
The Sales Representative fills out a form in Pitcher Impact and selects the required communication contacts.
When the Sales rep submits the form, it picks up the email addresses and the HTML email template from Pitcher Admin and triggers the email delivery process in the Pitcher Server.
The emails are then sent from a reserved sender email through the Pitcher Server using the Mailgun service.
The recipient email server receives the emails and sends the delivery status to Mailgun.
The Pitcher Server captures the latest statuses from Mailgun for all the emails sent and can be viewed by the Sales rep.
RTE Flow
What are different email statuses, and what do they mean?
As Pitcher uses Mailgun as its email provider, all of the email statuses displayed in Pitcher Multichannel are directly reviewed by Pitcher from Mailgun, and Pitcher does not create its custom statuses.
The Pitcher Multichannel emails can have the following statuses:
Event Type | Description |
|---|---|
| The recipient has read the email. |
| The email recipient clicked on the portal link in the email and navigated to the customer portal. |
| Mailgun accepted the request to send/forward the email, and the message has been placed in the queue. |
| Mailgun rejected the request to send/forward the email. |
| Mailgun sent the email, and it was accepted by the recipient email server. |
| Mailgun could not deliver the email to the recipient email server. severity=permanent when a message is not delivered. There are several reasons why Mailgun stops attempting to deliver messages and drops them including: hard bounces, messages that reached their retry limit, previously unsubscribed/bounced/complained addresses, or addresses rejected by an ESP. severity=temporary when a message is temporary rejected by an ESP. |
| The email recipient clicked on the spam complaint button within their email client. Feedback loops enable the notification to be received by Mailgun. |
| Mailgun has stored an incoming message. |
Why was my email not delivered?
There are multiple reasons why an email delivery might fail. Let us see the most common causes of email delivery failures.
Incorrect email addresses
In most cases, incorrect email addresses are the #1 reason for email delivery failure. Therefore, a sales rep must ensure they enter the correct email addresses in the HCP portal. The status for such email failures is tagged as failed by Mailgun.
Sales Reps must ensure they add the correct contact email addresses. Failure to do so may cause the overall email reputation to go down, resulting in emails being tagged as SPAM.
Recipient problems
Email delivery can also fail due to problems with the recipient’s email server. These are some of the common recipient mail server problems:
The recipient's email inbox is full, and there is no space to receive new emails.
The recipient's email server is not responsive.
Spam filters
This is covered in detail in the sections below.
Why does an email show up as delivered, although it was not delivered?
The email delivery status is sent to Mailgun by the recipient email server. The delivered status only shows that the recipient email server received the email and returned a successful delivery response to Mailgun. It does not mean the email hit the recipient’s inbox.
If an email shows up as delivered and the recipient cannot see it in their email inbox, it is possible that the email was filtered by the recipient’s email client and is moved to other locations, such as the quarantine/spam folder. Please ask your HCPs to check their email filtering rules or spam folder.
Why is my email tagged as spam?
Sometimes the emails delivered to the recipient’s inbox are tagged as spam and moved to the spam folder. In such cases, please ask your recipients to check their spam folder and remove the email address from their spam list.
Now, let us see the reasons why an email may be marked as spam:
Bad HTML template
If you’re using a badly designed HTML template for your emails. Then it may be picked up by the email clients as suspicious or spammy and tagged as spam.
Bad email reputation
It is possible that the emails are being tagged as spam because the reputation of the sender is going down (due to algorithms or recipient reports). This may result in the email address and the sender’s IP address getting blacklisted. In such cases, Pitcher can work with Mailgun to resolve this issue.
Recipients reporting/blocking the emails
As a Sales Rep., you should explain to your recipients that these emails are not spam and not to be marked as spam if they see it in their inbox. If the recipients do not want to receive emails, they can remove their subscription by following the unsubscription link in the email. The statuses for such emails show up as unsubscribed or complained.
Why does an email that was opened still has the delivered status?
When a message is submitted through Mailgun, an invisible 1x1 pixel image is embedded into the body of the message. This image performs a request to our server, logging the recipient's tracking information in your domain's Mailgun logs. However, you may find that Open Tracking is not working for some of the emails. This may be due to the following reasons:
The email must contain HTML content. Open tracking does not work on text-only emails.
The recipient must be able to load images in the email.
The recipient email client is actively blocking trackers causing Open Tracking to fail.
Refer https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/360013191513-Open-Tracking-Troubleshooting for more information.
Why is an email address in the Suppression List?
Suppressions are a mechanism Mailgun utilizes to help ensure the protection of a domain's reputation. Specifically, this is about internally preventing delivery to addresses that have been demonstrated as problematic for various reasons.
Since these email addresses have been proven to encounter issues with receiving mail from your domain in a way you certainly don't want to be repeated, Mailgun internally blocks sending to these addresses so they don't harm your email’s reputation. Without Suppressions to prevent further sending to these particular addresses, Pitcher’s domain would run into AUP violations such as high bounce and complaint rates, severely damaging our email deliverability; exactly what we don't want!
An email can end up in the suppression list for several reasons:
Bounces - These aren't just any bounces/failures; rather, these are those bounces that specifically happen due to a recipient's address being returned as invalid/non-existent/temporarily misconfigured.
Complaints - When a recipient complains about your sending by clicking to mark it as spam in their inbox.
The failure reason for email addresses in the suppression list is Not delivering previously bounced address.
Please get in touch with your Pitcher representative if you believe an email address has been wrongly added to the suppression list. We can work with Mailgun to remove the address from the suppression list.