Emails not showing in Mail Delivery Reports
I have an account which is sending some bulk mail. They are honoring opt outs and checking for bounces, but the problem happened on the very first send attempt. I have other accounts configured very close or identical that don't have this issue.
What happens is, the emails are sent from PHP (using SMTP, not mail()). After sending the batch, they all show as sent successfully (3000ish). But when checking mail delivery reports, only about 40ish show up. Nothing is in the Mail Queue. Only the emails in the delivery reports seem to be actually sent. There are some bounces and some rejected messages, but those are expected.
From what I understand, emails can be silently dropped due to some settings that are triggered by errors and deferrals. But I thought that this only comes into play if the per-account Hourly email setting is not "unlimited" which this account is. Or, if there are global settings that can trigger this, I believe I have them disabled (since other accounts on this server don't have this issue).
I've checked the exim logs and don't see anything that would indicated any issues beyond a few of the bounces and rejections. But I could be missing something.
How can I debug this further?
-
Hey there! First of all, bless you for honoring opt-outs and using a valid SMTP connection. For most users that is 99% of the battle right there!
It would be best to confirm that the mails actually do not exist in the Exim log on the system at all. Something like this would show the number of messages sent from that domain since the last time the Exim log was rotated:
grep "sendingaddress@domain.com" /var/log/exim_mainlog | wc -l
That should give you a number. If they are sending unique emails to all recipients and not one email with a large number of recipients on it, which I'm guessing they are doing the former, that output should be that large number.
By default, that log gets rotated weekly so hopefully there isn't too much extraneous output there, but that should at least be a start.
0 -
Yeah it is sending unique emails. It shows 500 items. There should be well over 3000.
One other thing to mention... if I send a one-off email, it sends fine. It only seems to happen when doing a bulk send.
Thanks for your help.
0 -
I believe we'd need to take a look at the system to get more information at this point. Could you submit a ticket to our team?
0 -
Thanks, will do.
1 -
Please post that number here so I can follow along once you have it!
0 -
Why trying to submit a technical support request, it tells me I need to go through my hosting provider Liquid Web. Is there any way to circumvent that? I haven't found them to be particularly helpful as of late.
0 -
Unfortunately I don't have a way around that - if they aren't able to resolve the issue they should escalate it to us.
0 -
I'm working with Liquid Web on this, but no solution yet. I wanted to update this thread with some findings in case it rings any bells.
I did a test sending 3300 emails to a test address. It immediately sends 30. Then it queues 970 (1000 total). After that it starts failing to send. In the end, the 1000 messages come through. But nothing after that and I do see those as failures.
Another thing... Another account that sends in a similar way uses PHP mail() instead of SMTP and that doesn't seem to have any problems.
So I'm wondering if there is some compound problem with using SMTP and then having the defers. But either way it seems like something is rate-limiting sends at 1000.
0 -
It might be best for them to escalate the ticket to us if they aren't able to come up with anything for you on their end.
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
9 comments