Outbound Email Issues

What's up with these bounce-back messages from postmaster@mail1.helpscout.net?You'll see a bounce-back message when a recipient's server refuses an email. There's usually a reason for the failure located in the bounce-back email. Look at the Status line for more information:

Final-Recipient: rfc822;james@domain.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.2 (bad destination system: no such domain)
X-PowerMTA-BounceCategory: bad-domain

In the example above, the message was not delivered because the domain doesn't exist. Naturally, we can't deliver email to a domain that isn't active! There are quite a few reasons for delivery failure, and we'd be happy to provide some insight for specific cases if needed. Just get in touch!

My customer reports that they did not receive my email. Can you tell me why?
Spam prevention on the customer's side is the most common reason your email did not reach your customer. There is no way to guarantee any email you send from any source will not get blocked, but there are steps you can take to improve deliverability. 

If you are using Help Scout servers to send, make sure that you have set up SPF and DKIM so that Help Scout is an approved sender for your domain. Alternatively, you can set up Help Scout connect to a custom SMTP server or Google oAuth to send emails directly from your provider. 

I sent an attachment, but my customer says it didn't come across?
As long as the file is successfully attached in Help Scout and sent with your reply, the customer likely received the attachment. It's entirely possible they're just overlooking it, or their mail client is not displaying the file as it should. If you have any doubts, let us know, and we can take a look at the mail server to see if the file was delivered.

When the combined size of all attached files is over 8MB, we send the files as links instead of attachments. This conversion to links is to make sure your email gets through - some email clients will block emails with large attachments, and spam filters are also more suspicious of email with big attachments. If you're sending a large number of attachments, your customer might be overlooking the links.