Summary
When you look at the Email Delivery Statuses report you might see Queued, Deferral, Rejected and Bounced or Dropped in the Status column.
Key Points
Queued means the email is being delivered with a slight delay.
Deferral means it went to the customer, but our email delivery provider does not give us a way to update that status
Rejected means the customer's email server received the email and the server refused to deliver it
Bounced or Dropped mean the email address was not a valid email address
Queued:
Queued means the email is being delivered with a slight delay. This usually occurs if there are many emails waiting in line to be sent through our email service provider.
Deferral:
A Deferral email goes through to the customer, but our mail delivery provider does not give us a way to update that status. 99.9% of the time is it delivered normally with a possibly slight delay.
Deferral emails have unusual characteristics. It could be their email servers are busy or temporarily offline, or any one of a hundred different things. When Deferrals happen we keep sending until it goes though, but that original Deferral status stays locked in from the first try. Their servers don't update it.
Rejected:
Rejected means the customer's email server received the email and the server refused to deliver it. The email server does not provide a reason for rejecting it. Most common reasons for rejecting it include:
the name portion of the email address has a typo
the email address is no longer valid
the email address is no longer in use
the inbox was full
the server/recipient marked the email as Spam
the recipient requested to unsubscribe through their email service
the recipient manually added your email address to the reject blacklist
the IT department is blocking emails with an attachment
the email server blocks emails from outside the U.S.
the internet email provider changed its server security
Bounced and Dropped
The email address was not a valid email address. Confirm the email address with the customer.
The email server blocks emails from outside the U.S.
We use Mandrill as our email service and they have servers worldwide. When we deliver an email we put it at the bottom of the Mandrill email pool, (this is when you see Queued as the status). As it moves up to the top of the list to be sent, it's possible Mandrill will move the email to a server in another country to get it sent sooner.
If your customer is a government agency, or a big conglomerate. it's possible they block emails that come from outside the U.S. So while we show the email as delivered they don't get it.
The internet email provider changed its server security
Email providers are constantly upgrading their security to prevent hackers from breaking into their system. This is especially true of Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL as hackers have recently broken into their systems.
This is the most difficult option to track down because Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and other's don't tell us what they've changed.
For us to deliver emails to Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and other very restrictive email services we have to send the email from our authorized domain "serviceworkportal.com", which is signed and secure. We have to send it that way to avoid it being rejected.
For example, if you send an invoice to a client at clientname@A0L.com and we send it from Fieldwork as being from yourpestcontrol@example.com, your client's email at AOL will reject the email as Spam. We have to replace the domain with our signed/secure domain.
Yahoo and AOL are both really hard to work with now. Sending to a customer with a Yahoo or AOL email address is not a problem as long as you are not sending it from Yahoo or AOL.
Note If the email recipient marks the email as Spam, our email server will not send any more email to that email address for a year. They'll show up as rejected in the Email Statuses report. There is no way around this. Get a new new email address from the customer and put it in their account.
Also, a variant of that, Dropped, means that a customer previously marked an email from you as Spam, to honor that, the email is dropped and not sent.
