Troubleshooting email delivery issues

Transcript

Welcome to Adobe Campaign Classic.

By the end of this module, you will know how to troubleshoot delivery issues in Campaign.

What we mean by delivery failures is that your message was unable to be sent to our intended recipient.

There are three types of errors when a message fails. Each error type determines if an address is sent to the quarantine list. We’ll cover quarantine shortly. The first type of error are hard errors. These errors indicate an invalid address. These errors result in the address being sent directly to quarantine. The second type are soft errors. These might be considered temporary errors, or one that could be categorized such as invalid domain or mailbox full. If these errors occur, the address typically will only be sent to quarantine after a defined set of retries in the hope that the problem could be resolved during the delivery duration. The final type of errors are ignored. This is an error that is known to be temporary such as out of office or a technical error. These errors get found in the analysis phase, and no emails can send to them. Ignored errors do not send an address to quarantine.

Once the delivery has completed, the first place you want to go to look is the delivery log tab from the delivery dashboard. This shows the logs on the delivery with multiple statuses including sent, failed, and ignored. These statuses are key to find out why a delivery has failed. You can filter the entries by their status. The most important status to look for is the failed status. Here are the possible reasons why a delivery could fail.

A very common error to encounter is a user unknown error. This means the email address does not exist, and no further deliveries will be attempted for this profile. The solution could be as simple as removing the profile or attempt to correct if the details are currently known. Another error that isn’t as common is account disabled. This means the account linked to the address is not active anymore. This is enforced by the internet access provider due to a lengthy period of inactivity.

Unreachable is an error that has occurred in the message delivery chain. It could be an incident over the SMTP relay, or a domain that is currently unreachable. According to the error, the address will be tried again until the error counter reaches five, or it will be directly sent to quarantine. If recipient messages are failing with an unreachable error stating, error while compiling et cetera, the cause of this issue is almost always a personalization within the HTML attempted to call some external fields. To correct this, the workflow and delivery content needs to be reviewed to determine specifically what personalization is attempting to call and question, and whether or not it can be mapped. To correct this, the workflow and delivery content needs to be reviewed to determine specifically what personalization is attempting to call and question, and whether or not it can be mapped. From there, either removing the call in the HTML or fixing the mapping to the delivery could be the path to a solution. Some deliveries can fail with an unreachable error stating inbound mail bounce. This means that the delivery succeeded, but Adobe Campaign received an auto reply from the recipient that matched the bounce inbound auto reply rule set. This does not require immediate action, but a constant flow of auto replies could be a sign of an inactive account.

When you encounter these kinds of email bounces, it will be good to know how to tackle them. When an email cannot not be delivered to a recipient, the remote messaging server automatically returns an error message to a technical inbox designed for this purpose. Error messages are collected by the Adobe Campaign platform and qualified by an in mail process to enrich the list of email management rules. It contains all the rules by the Adobe campaign to qualify delivery failures. It is non-exhaustive, and is regularly updated by Adobe Campaign, and can be managed by a user. Messages can be excluded during the delivery preparation if an address is quarantined, or if a profile is on a deny list. Excluded messages are listed in the delivery tab under exclusions. Here are the kinds of errors you might see for exclusions. Double, meaning the address of a recipient was already in this delivery. Excluded by SQL rule or arbitration rule are enforced by the typologies set up to perform some queries to filter out unwanted addresses from the database. Unqualified addresses means the recipient doesn’t have a qualified postal address on their profile. None of these errors require urgent action on your part unless you start to see a pattern where majority of your recipients are getting excluded. Maybe your topology sets are too rigid, or your data has to be cleansed.

Some failures can occur during the analysis and have to be resolved immediately. Luckily these errors are usually very easy to fix and occur due to some oversight. It could be as simple as forgetting to set the subject line on your email.

You can make some mistake when dealing with the HTML and JavaScript constructs.

You can always make sure this doesn’t happen by previewing your content first, and any rendering issue can appear here before you send the delivery.

We have now covered which types of errors send addresses to quarantine. I will briefly cover quarantine.

As well in the delivery tab, you can also see the exclusion rules implemented in the audit tab. Adobe Campaign Managers are list of quarantined addresses. Recipients whose addresses are quarantined are excluded by default during the delivery analysis, and will not be targeted. This will speed up deliveries as the error rate has a significant effect on the delivery speed. Some internet access providers automatically consider emails to be spam if the rate of invalid addresses is too high. Quarantine, therefore, allows you to avoid being added to a deny list by these providers. Quarantine applies only to an address not the profile itself. It means that if two profiles have the same email address, they will both be affected if the address is quarantined. Being on the deny list on the other hand, will result in the profile no longer being targeted by delivery, for example after a subscription opt out.

You should now be able to troubleshoot delivery issues in Campaign including looking at the various types of errors. Thank you, and I’ll see you next time. -