Troubleshoot email problems

When an email doesn't behave the way you expect, the fix usually starts with figuring out which of a handful of known problems you're actually looking at. This article works through the most common symptoms one at a time: what it looks like, what typically causes it, how to fix it, and how to confirm the fix worked.

#Emails going to spam

Symptom: Recipients report your email landed in their spam or junk folder, or you notice unusually low open rates compared to past sends.

Likely causes:

• Missing or misconfigured SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records on your sending domain.
• A domain that isn't warmed up yet, or one with a damaged reputation from a previous high-complaint send.
• Content that trips spam filters (see Email deliverability best practices).
• A "From" address whose domain doesn't match your DMARC-aligned sending domain.

Fix:

1. Send a test email to a Gmail address, open it, click the three-dot menu, and choose Show original.
2. Confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all show PASS. If any show FAIL, revisit Set up your sending domain and authentication.
3. If authentication passes but delivery is still poor, check your complaint and bounce rates in campaign statistics — a damaged reputation from past sends is a more likely culprit than a fresh technical issue.

Verify: Send a follow-up test and confirm it lands in the inbox, not spam, across a couple of different providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo).

#Emails not delivered at all

Symptom: A contact never receives the email, and it doesn't show up in their spam folder either — it simply never arrives.

Likely causes:

• The contact is on a suppression list (see Manage unsubscribes, bounces, and compliance) or marked Do Not Disturb (DND).
• The receiving mail server rejected the message outright due to a DMARC policy mismatch — this happens silently, without generating a bounce notice in some cases.
• The domain in your From address has a strict DMARC policy (p=reject) but you're sending from a shared domain that isn't authenticated for it.

Fix:

1. Check the contact's record for a DND flag or suppression status first — the most common cause and fastest to confirm.
2. If DND isn't the issue, check whether your From address domain and actual sending domain match. A mismatch combined with a strict DMARC policy causes silent rejection.
3. If you're on a shared domain and your business domain has p=reject set, either move to a dedicated, authenticated domain or temporarily relax DMARC to p=none while you finish setup.

Verify: Send a test to the same contact (or an address on the same domain) and confirm it arrives.

#Emails bounced

Symptom: A campaign report shows a contact bounced.

Likely causes:

• Hard bounce — the address doesn't exist, is misspelled, or the domain itself is invalid. Permanent; the address won't ever accept mail.
• Soft bounce — a temporary issue: a full inbox, a server timeout, or a message too large. Often resolves on its own with a later retry.

Fix:

• For hard bounces, remove or suppress the address — continuing to send to it drags down your sender reputation across your whole list, not just for that one contact.
• For soft bounces, no action is usually needed for an isolated case. If the same address soft-bounces repeatedly across multiple sends, treat it like a hard bounce and suppress it.

Verify: Check the contact's bounce history after your next send — a hard-bounced address that's been properly suppressed won't reappear in future bounce reports because it won't be sent to at all.

#Emails showing "via" in the recipient's inbox

Symptom: The recipient sees something like "Your Business via mail.example.com" instead of just your business name.

Likely cause: The domain in your From address doesn't match the domain that's actually SPF/DKIM-aligned for the send. Gmail flags this mismatch to the recipient with the "via" notice.

Fix: Make sure your From Email's domain is the same domain you've authenticated and verified in Email Services — not a different or generic shared one. If you're using a Default Header override, confirm it's set to an address on your verified dedicated domain.

Verify: Send a test to Gmail after the fix; the "via" notice should no longer appear.

#Images not loading

Symptom: Recipients see broken image icons or blank space where images should be.

Likely causes:

• Images hosted somewhere with unreliable uptime or blocked hotlinking.
• The recipient's email client blocks images by default — a common setting, but it shouldn't affect everyone, only recipients with it on.
• A broken or expired image URL, especially if it was uploaded somewhere temporary rather than the email builder's own asset library.

Fix: Re-upload images directly through the builder's image element rather than an external host, and always add descriptive alt text (see design tips).

Verify: Send a test and open it in a couple of email clients (webmail and a phone's mail app cover most cases) to confirm images render.

#Missing unsubscribe link

Symptom: A recipient can't find a way to opt out, or reports there's no unsubscribe link at all.

Likely cause: This is rare on standard marketing campaigns, since the platform adds an unsubscribe link automatically — it's more often a case of the link being present but hard to spot (small text, low contrast, buried at the very bottom below a long footer) rather than truly missing. It can also happen if a message was incorrectly categorized as transactional when it was actually promotional, since transactional messages aren't required to carry one.

Fix: Check the email's category (marketing vs. transactional) is set correctly, and check the template's footer section wasn't edited in a way that removed the unsubscribe element from the layout.

Verify: Send yourself a test and confirm the unsubscribe link is visible and clickable without excessive scrolling.

#Contact marked Do Not Disturb (DND)

Symptom: A specific contact never receives any email, campaign or workflow, even though everything about the send looks correct.

Likely cause: The contact has been marked DND — either manually, through an unsubscribe action, after marking a previous email as spam (a "Complained" event), or through a workflow automation you built yourself.

Fix: Open the contact's record and check their DND status. If you intend for them to receive mail again, you'll need to explicitly clear the flag — but think carefully first: if DND was set because they complained or unsubscribed, re-enabling sends to them without genuine re-permission is a compliance risk, not just a technical one.

Verify: After clearing DND (when appropriate), send a low-stakes test and confirm delivery, then monitor their engagement on the next real send.

#What done looks like

For any of the above, you can point to the specific cause (not just "it's broken"), you've applied the matching fix, and you've sent a verification test that confirms the behavior actually changed — not just that you made a change and hoped.

#Related articles

• Set up your sending domain and authentication
• Email deliverability best practices
• Manage unsubscribes, bounces, and compliance

#Frequently asked questions

#Why did only some recipients report spam-folder delivery, not everyone?

Spam filtering is per-recipient and per-provider. Inconsistent delivery is normal and doesn't necessarily mean your domain or content is the problem; check your aggregate complaint and bounce rates before assuming a systemic issue.

#I fixed my SPF/DKIM/DMARC records — why is deliverability still bad a day later?

Authentication passing is necessary but not sufficient. If your domain's reputation was already damaged by a high-complaint send, expect it to take time to recover, similar to a fresh warm-up. See Email deliverability best practices.

#Can I manually resend to a contact who bounced?

Check whether it was a hard or soft bounce first. Resending to a hard-bounced address will bounce again and adds no value — repeated attempts against invalid addresses actively hurt your sender reputation.