Teamleader Focus allows you to send all kinds of emails: regular emails, invoices, quotations, work orders, ticket responses, and so on. However, it’s possible that one of those emails fails to deliver. This article will tell you more about common causes & how to fix or help prevent them.
As we don’t want you to lose track of the status of these emails, we keep track of them in your Email log. Here, you can see the outgoing emails sent in the past 2 weeks and their respective statuses. As an admin user, you’ll see all outgoing emails here. As a non-admin user, you’ll only see the emails you sent yourself.
Even though most emails arrive at your correspondent without any issues, it’s always possible that an email fails to be delivered, or - using a technical term - ‘bounces’. You can find those bounced emails in the email log and will also receive a notification (in app and/or via email, according to your preferences) about it. This way, you’re able to straighten out whatever issue is at play.
Causes
A bounce can have many different causes, most of which are already specified in the notification and email log. To give you an idea, here’s a (non exhaustive) list of reasons why an email might fail to deliver:
The inbox of the recipient is full
There is a typo in the email address of the recipient
The email address didn’t exist (yet) at the time of sending
Your email was withheld by the spam filter of the recipient
….
How can I prevent ending up in my customer’s spam filter?
As you can see, you can’t always prevent an email from bouncing as the cause of the bounce can be situated at the receiver as well.
However, the fourth cause (being withheld by the spam filter) is something you can take preventive measures against. To avoid this scenario, we advise you to:
Set up your own domain in Teamleader Focus. Allowing us to send your emails in the name of your own domain decreases the chance of being considered ‘spam’ by the end customer’s email provider.
Be mindful of the way you construct your email body and subject (especially in your email templates). This blogpost is a good place to start.
Tip: avoid using shortened URLs in your emails, email templates and signatures. Shortened URLs (f.e. bit.ly links) are often blocked by email providers such as Gmail.
Teamleader Focus also does its part to guarantee a spotless sender reputation: all emails sent from Teamleader Focus also contain a simple text version; which is practical for mobile customers and appreciated by spam filters. All emails are also sent from IP addresses with a good reputation that are being monitored daily.
The importance of DMARC
Even if you've successfully set up your Teamleader domain verification, you might still have trouble sending emails to some customers. This happens because, since February 2024, certain email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) are more strict about checking your DMARC record.
A DMARC record is like a "note" attached to your emails, providing clear instructions to email providers on what to do if something is wrong with the authentication of the email. Without this DMARC record, some email providers might get a bit cautious and could even reject your emails in general.
To prevent this from happening, we advise you to add a DMARC record/policy to your domain's settings. Note that this is not strictly related to Teamleader Focus, but will improve your email deliverability in general.
If you don't have a DMARC record added to your domain yet, you can follow these simple steps:
1. Go to your domain's DNS settings (where you added the CNAME records).
2. Create a new DNS record.
3. Choose "TXT" as the record type.
4. In the name field, enter "_dmarc.yourdomain.com" (replace "yourdomain.com" with your actual domain).
5. In the value field, enter "v=DMARC1; p=none;".
How do I remove a bounce?
After an email failed to be delivered multiple times, it’s possible that the system doesn’t try to deliver new emails to that email address. Why? To protect our own sender reputation (see above). Frequent attempts to reach bounced email addresses are seen as spam. In that case, the email address has to be manually ‘unbounced’. In most cases, this can be done by clicking through on the email in your Email log:
If you’re not able to do this, our Support team can do this for you in the background. Feel free to contact our support team and make sure to mention the bounced email address. After the email address has been unbounced, a new email can be sent to the email address in order to check if the issue has been resolved.