<p>If you find that your email recipients are complaining that they are not receiving your emails, here are some common situations that may be used to help you diagnose the problem:</p> <p><strong>1. You recently created a new account with SendGrid</strong></p> <p>If you have recently signed up for a new account with SendGrid, it is possible that you account may not be <strong>active</strong> or <strong>provisioned</strong>. Be sure you have responded to the activation email sent to the email address you provided upon signup. If you have responded to this email and still are unable to use the service, it is most likely due to the fact your account has not been <strong>provisioned</strong> yet.</p> <p>SendGrid screens all new accounts that signup to ensure that only legitimate customers use our service for legitimate purposes. While we typically are able to provision new accounts quickly, there are times when this process is delayed. <strong>To expedite the provisioning process, make sure you provide valid contact information, and a website that is accessible and whose purpose can easily be understood. </strong>Providing a URL that leads to a parked domain, a "coming soon" splash page, or a 404 page will almost always end up delaying your account provisioning.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>2. You are having trouble sending email to one or more email addresses, or your Requests statistic is much higher than your Delivered<br /></strong></p> <p>If you repeatably have difficulty sending email to specific email addresses, it often indicates that the email address in question is on one of your account's Email Lists. Currently SendGrid maintains the following email lists on a per-account basis:</p> <ul> <li>Bounce List</li> <li>Unsubscribe List</li> <li>Spam Report List</li> <li>Invalid Email List</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Each of these lists is accessible from the <strong>EMAIL LIST</strong> section of the website navigation bar.</p> <p><img src="/attachments/token/w0df29omn97lldi/?name=sendgrid_email_list_navigation.png" border="0" alt="sendgrid_email_list_navigation.png" /></p> <p><strong>When an email address lands in any of these lists, future emails for this email address are automatically discarded by SendGrid.</strong> This is done to protect your sending reputation as many ISPs frown on repeated bounces, and deliveries to addresses that have unsubscribed or have issued spam reports are certain to cause problems.</p> <p>If you do find that a valid email has landed in any of these Email Lists, you have the option to remove that email address from the list by choosing the <strong>delete</strong> action for the email's entry in the table. The following image displays the SendGrid bounce list with some demonstration data:</p> <p><img src="/attachments/token/95p10p6dncfm10x/?name=bounce_list.png" border="0" alt="bounce_list.png" width="783" height="272" /></p> 2010-03-04T12:42:42-07:00 bounce deliverability email_lists list spam unsubscribe 102389 17 122303 false false true true 0 Joe Scharf 6940355 2010-03-09T13:26:50-07:00 <p><img src="/attachments/token/dnwankh3wvmfgay/?name=spam_check_filter.png" border="0" alt="spam_check_filter.png" /></p> <p><strong>About the Spam Checker Filter</strong></p> <p>The Spam Checker filter, located on the Filters section of the Sendgrid website is useful when your web application allows your end users to create content that is then emailed through your SendGrid account.&nbsp; Since emailing user generated content is hard to monitor and can often be abused by spammers, the Spam Checker filter can provide notification when emails are detected that exceed a predefined spam threshold.</p> <p><strong>Using the Spam Checker Filter</strong></p> <p>The spam checker filter is enabled by dragging the filter into the right column of enabled filters. Once enabled, you can click on settings to define the Spam Threshold and URL to post spam messages parameters:</p> <p><img src="/attachments/token/qe12qlpfpujylx8/?name=spam_check_filter_settings.png" border="0" alt="spam_check_filter_settings.png" width="773" height="136" /></p> <p><strong>Spam Threshold:</strong> Emails with a spam score over this value will be considered spam, and a notification message will be POSTed to you at the URL to post spam messages</p> <p><strong>URL to post spam messages:</strong> SendGrid will send a HTTP POST request when it detects emails that are considered spam.</p> <p><strong>HTTP POST details</strong></p> <p>The HTTP POST request that you receive at the designated URL will contain the following two parameters:</p> <ol> <li><strong>email</strong> - The contents of the email</li> <li><strong>report</strong> - The detailed SpamAssassin report describing why the email was designated as spam.</li> </ol> 2010-03-04T11:57:01-07:00 filters spam_checker 102389 13 122267 false false true true 0 Joe Scharf 6940355 2010-03-04T12:05:23-07:00 <p><strong>Help, my emails are received with an On Behalf Of message</strong></p> <p>Some ISPs or mail readers, such as Hotmail or Outlook, will display a message with the Sender header set as <strong>“on behalf of”</strong> and then the address that is in the Sender header. This is caused by the DomainKeys configuration of your account.</p> <p>By default, SendGrid signs all e-mail with DomainKeys to improve its ability to be delivered to the inbox. However, with accounts that do not have whitelabeling, this means that the domain in the From field will not have the proper <acronym title="Domain Name System">DNS</acronym> record to authenticate the e-mail. Because of this, SendGrid inserts a Sender header, and the e-mail can then be properly authenticated.</p> <p><strong>Ways to fix it:</strong></p> <ol> <li>Disable the DomainKeys filter in the filters section of your account</li> <li>Upgrade to a SendGrid package (currently Silver or higher) that provides whitelabel support and customization of the DomainKeys settings. Be sure you've configured your DNS for the necessary whitelabel settings described <a href="http://wiki.sendgrid.com/doku.php?id=whitelabel" target="_blank">here</a>.</li> <li>Use the domain specified in your DomainKeys filter setting as the domain in your From header. (Silver level or higher)</li> </ol> 2010-01-12T14:01:25-07:00 behalf dns domainkeys whitelabel 102389 224 98008 true false true true 0 Joe Scharf 6940355 2010-01-25T20:27:31-07:00 <p>Some DNS providers do not support underscores in CNAME records, however an underscore is required in a Domain Keys entry.</p> <p>If your provider does not let you use underscores, you need to create TXT records instead. The following records are required:</p> <pre class="wiki">smtpapi._domainkey.&lt;&lt;user's domain&gt;&gt; TXT k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDPtW5iwpXVPiH5FzJ7Nrl8USzuY9zqqzjE0D1r04xDN6qwziDnmgcFNNfMewVKN2D1O+2J9N14hRprzByFwfQW76yojh54Xu3uSbQ3JP0A7k8o8GutRF8zbFUA8n0ZH2y0cIEjMliXY4W4LwPA7m4q0ObmvSjhd63O9d8z1XkUBwIDAQAB<br />smtpapi._domainkey.&lt;&lt;subdomain.users's domain&gt;&gt; TXT k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDPtW5iwpXVPiH5FzJ7Nrl8USzuY9zqqzjE0D1r04xDN6qwziDnmgcFNNfMewVKN2D1O+2J9N14hRprzByFwfQW76yojh54Xu3uSbQ3JP0A7k8o8GutRF8zbFUA8n0ZH2y0cIEjMliXY4W4LwPA7m4q0ObmvSjhd63O9d8z1XkUBwIDAQAB<br /></pre> 2010-01-07T15:48:36-07:00 dns domainkeys underscore 102389 129 96202 true false true true 0 Joe Scharf 6940355 2010-01-25T20:26:38-07:00