What Happened to my Email I sent?
If you send an email to someone, and they do not get it, many people assume that it did not actually go out. This is not true in most cases. Usually, the reason is that a spam filter picked it off someplace, and deleted it.
Now you are thinking what you sent was not spam, so why would a spam filter delete it. There can be many reasons. Spam filters do not have a list of what is spam and what is not. Instead, they use rules and logic to try to determine what they are seeing. They are not always correct, and may determine that a legitimate email is spam, and delete it. This is what is known as a false positive. (ED: if you want to read more about email spam filters, look for using Bayesian Transformation for spam filtering on a site like Wikipedia.)
If the spam filter is well tuned, the number of false positives will be very low. However, they can not be totally eliminated, without allowing large amounts of true spam through.
So, if you have emails that do not get to where they are sent, the first thing is to check that they did actually go out. In most cases they will have, but it is worth checking. Your system administrator can check the mail logs. These logs will show what happened to the email, as far as your mail server is concerned. If you did not get a message back that there was a problem sending, then in virtually all cases, the logs will show that the mail was handed off to the recipients mail server.
If your message was delivered to the recipients server, then what happened to it is beyond the control of your servers and administrator. Time to get the people on the other end involved. Contact them, and get their email administrators involved. They should be able to determine from the logs on there end, what happened to your messages. It may be a configuration on their end, or on yours, that can be addressed. In most cases, what is involved is adding an exception, or "whitelist" entry, so that the spam filter knows that email you send is okay, and to pass it through.
Since the majority of your emails should go through with no issues, these steps will only need to be taken once in a while. It usually does not take much time to find where mail is disappearing, and either adjust the settings, or add a whitelist entry.
If need help diagnosing Email and Email Server problems or tuning these systems, contact CCS Retail Systems Support Department for help.