Email Deliverability FAQ

There are two scenarios where this could happen:

1. The email was sent successfully. However, it was sorted into the Promotion or Spam folder. If you think this could have happened, it is best to ask the recipient directly to check this folder.
2. The email was sent from Smore was "successfully sent" and has gone through all of the proper channels on Smore's end. However, the email provider or firewall on the recipient's end may not accept the email and therefore, the email was never delivered. If you think this has occurred for your recipient/s, it is best to contact the email provider or IT department and find out why this happened.

The gray dot appears during the attempt to send the newsletter. It indicates that our system is in the process of trying to send the emailed newsletter to the recipient. Sometimes, this process can take time depending on multiple factors that can occur on Smore's end or the recipient's end.

The Smore emailing system attempts to send your email to the recipient 3 times. During this time, a gray dot may appear. Depending on the 3 attempts, Currently, if the email is sent successfully or bounced, the gray dot will remain. We are going to resolve this reporting issue in the future. If you have any questions about whether or not the newsletter was successfully delivered to a recipient with a gray dot, please reach out to Support@smore.com.

A bounced email means that the email failed to be delivered. There are a lot of factors that can cause an email to bounce. You can read more about bounced emails by clicking here!

When you receive the red "x" in your Email Report, this indicates that the email was bounced. As mentioned above, the email was not delivered and the emailing system will not attempt to email this recipient again.

There are two types of bounced emails: "bounced" and "dropped."

"Bounced" typically means that the email address does not exist at all. Some examples could be that the email address is either misspelled or again, does not exist.

In this situation, it's best to verify your email addresses through an email verification service. This will help avoid "bounces." Usually, when this occurs, we automatically move these email addresses to a "Blacklist" that will not allow our emailing system to email this email address again. We do this to protect our email servers' reputation (too many bounces can hurt our deliverability score in the future).

"Dropped" usually means that the email address does exist, however, there was some interference within the emailing process that continually blocked (through multiple attempts) the email from being delivered successfully.

There could be many reasons why the email was not delivered, for example, the server was too busy to send the email or the recipient's mailbox was full. Unfortunately, because of the different factors, it can be difficult to determine the cause of a "soft" bounce. We do not blacklist "soft" bounces.

If you believe that one of your recipient's email was "dropped", we recommend sending the email to that recipient again. If the email address continues to "bounce" and you've verified the email address, please contact us at support@smore.com and we will see if we can help!

Yes, if the email bounced your email credits will be returned to your account.

This can sometimes occur if you are sending to multiple recipients with the same domain name (for example school/district email address). This domain may have specific spam filters and settings that are blocking emails from Smore. If this happens, it is best to contact your IT department and ask them to whitelist Smore. You can learn more about how to unblock Smore by clicking here:

Contact us directly at support@smore.com with as much information you can provide, including:

• The name of the newsletter you attempted to send
• The email address/es of recipient/s who are experiencing deliverability issues
• Any additional information that you can provide that may be helpful

Yes. But please note that because of the nature of list-servs, if a recipient decides to "unsubscribe" or "block" communication from you, this will affect the entire list-serv and you will not be able to email this list-serv again through Smore.

For this reason, we recommend uploading the entire list-serv into Smore for better email report tracking and to guarantee that your entire list-serv will not be unsubscribed because of one recipient.