Find out why one person did not get your email
Investigate delivery for one contact in Mailsoftly: read the verdict and its evidence, send the subscriber a rescue page, and verify the fix with a fresh copy.
Someone writes in and says they never got your email. You open the campaign, scroll the recipient list, find their row, and it tells you nothing useful. That table only knows three things: clicked, opened, or a dash. It never shows a bounce, it never shows that the address is on your do-not-send list, and it never shows that the person quietly opted out months ago. So the dash you are staring at could mean five completely different things.
Investigate delivery answers the question the recipient list cannot. It looks at the last ninety days of sends to that one address, pulls together what the mailbox provider told us, and gives you a plain verdict, the evidence behind it, and something concrete to do next.
Open the contact and start the investigation
Go to Audience in the sidebar and click the person who complained. On their profile, the left summary card carries a button reading Investigate delivery, just under their details. It appears on any contact who has an email address on file.
This is the only way in. There is no equivalent button on a campaign report, so always start from the person, not from the send.
Click it and a panel slides in from the right titled Delivery insights, with the contact’s address underneath.
Read the verdict at the top
The panel leads with one sentence that names what happened, and a second that says why we think so. The subhead above it sets the scope honestly: what we can see for the recent campaigns sent to this contact.
There are three broad shapes of verdict.
- A standing condition on the address, which is the highest priority because it stops sends before they leave. The address unsubscribed, it opted out of one of your email types, or it is on your do-not-send list after a delivery failure or a spam complaint.
- A verdict about the most recent send. The provider accepted it and a real person opened it, the provider accepted it but nothing happened at all, the message came back, or the campaign finished sending less than a few hours ago and is still settling.
- Nothing to diagnose yet, when no campaign has gone to that address in the last ninety days.
Next to the subhead sits a Copy summary button. It puts the whole panel on your clipboard as plain text: the verdict, the evidence, the numbered next steps and the recent sends list, with the date it was checked. That is the fastest way to paste the situation into a support ticket or a note for a colleague.
If your sending domain has lost its verification, a warning sits above the verdict telling you to fix that first. Ignore the individual mailbox until you have, because a domain problem affects everyone, not one person.
Check the evidence behind the verdict
Under the verdict is a small toggle labelled Why we say this. Open it and you get the facts the verdict was built from, in plain sentences rather than technical logs.
Depending on the case you may see which device a real open came from, whether the open was an automatic preview rather than a person, whether other subscribers on the same mailbox provider opened the same campaign normally, and what the mailbox told us when it refused the message.
One line here is worth memorising, because it settles the most common argument in email. When an email was opened only by an automatic preview, the panel tells you that your campaign stats can still show that send as opened, since previews count as opens there, while no open by hand has been recorded. Apple Mail’s privacy preview is called out by name, because it loads emails in advance for Apple Mail users and does not mean anyone read them.
Bounce reasons are always translated into ordinary language, never raw server output. You will see phrases like the mailbox is full, the message was too large, or the address does not seem to exist.
Read the per-send history and its badges
Expand Recent sends to see up to five of the most recent campaigns that went to this address, newest first, each with a date and a coloured badge. Campaign names link straight through to the full campaign, and a send that was itself a fresh copy is tagged as one.
There are seven badges in total.
- Opened means a real open or click by a person was recorded.
- Auto-opened only means the provider’s automatic preview registered but no open by hand did, which usually means the email reached the mailbox and landed in a filtered folder.
- No activity means the provider accepted the email with no bounce and no error, and no open of any kind has been seen.
- Could not be delivered means the message came back permanently.
- Turned away temporarily means the mailbox refused it for now, usually storage or a momentary refusal.
- Needs support means we could not pin the cause to anything on the subscriber’s side, and there is nothing for them to fix.
- Still settling means the campaign finished sending less than four hours ago, so opens have not had time to appear.
The panel does not tell you which folder an email landed in, and Mailsoftly has no inbox placement or seed list testing. Auto-opened only is an informed reading of an automatic preview with no human open, not a look inside somebody’s mailbox.
Work through the suggested next steps
The What you can do card holds a short numbered list, written for the situation the verdict found. A bounce asks you to confirm the exact address and fix any typo. A filtered send asks you to have the subscriber check Spam or Junk, mark the message as Not spam, add your sending address to their contacts and send you a short reply. A soft bounce asks about mailbox storage.
Two of these are worth knowing about in advance.
- When the address is on your do-not-send list, the step carries a link straight to that list, which is the Suppression list screen. Clear the address only after the subscriber confirms their mailbox is working.
- When someone opted out themselves, there is no step that puts them back on. Share your subscribe form or preference page and let them do it. That lock is deliberate.
Cases that need us rather than you show a Contact support button instead of a list, with nothing named as the cause. Every other verdict keeps a Create a support ticket link at the bottom of the panel if you want a second pair of eyes.
Create a rescue page for the subscriber
When the verdict is that the email arrived but was filtered, or that it was accepted with no activity at all, the panel offers a Rescue page. Press Create the help page and you get a private link built for that one person.
Copy the link with the Copy link button, or use Open the page to see it first. Then send it to the subscriber from your own personal email, by text, or read it out over the phone. That last part matters: our emails are the ones they are not receiving, so sending the link through Mailsoftly would defeat the point.
You can create twenty rescue pages per account per day.
Know what the subscriber sees
The rescue page is not for you, it is for them, so it is worth opening once so you know what you are sending. It carries your company name, not ours, and greets them with a heading about getting your emails into their inbox, along with a note that it was prepared for their address.
Then it walks them through three things, in order of how much they help.
- Reply to us, with a button that opens a new email to your sending address. A reply is the strongest single trust signal a person can give their own mail provider.
- Add us to your contacts, since providers rarely filter mail from a saved contact.
- Instructions written for their specific mailbox. The page recognises Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, Outlook and Hotmail, iCloud and Comcast, and falls back to general steps for everything else.
A short checklist closes the page, covering filters, forwarding, blocked senders and mailbox storage.
A rescue page link stays live for sixty days, then it stops working and the page asks the visitor to request a fresh one. If you are giving somebody a link over the phone, do not expect it to still work months later.
Verify the fix with a fresh copy
Once the subscriber has worked through the steps, you want proof that something changed. The Verify with a fresh copy card sends them one more copy of the campaign the panel diagnosed, to that single address, and then waits.
Press Send a fresh copy now and the card turns into a Fresh copy watch. Come back to the same panel later and it will tell you either that no real open has come in yet, or that the copy was opened by hand and this one looks resolved.
Three things to know before you press it.
- A fresh copy goes out from your account like any normal send, so it counts against your sending allowance for the day and the month.
- You can send ten fresh copies per account per day.
- If the address has become ineligible in the meantime, for instance because it unsubscribed or landed on your do-not-send list, the send is refused and the panel tells you so.
The card only appears when a fresh copy can actually settle the question: the last send must be a finished campaign, the verdict must be one a resend can test, and the same campaign must not have gone to that address in the last twenty four hours.
Between the verdict, the rescue page and the fresh copy, you can close the loop on a complaint in a single sitting, and you can tell the person exactly what happened rather than promising to look into it.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
