Prospect tells me email sent from HS is not arriving in their inbox nor spam

[neilredding]

Hi — 

I'm just starting to use HS, and the first Contact I tried to email via the HB email UI tells me (separately via LinkedIn Message) that the email is not arriving (neither inbox nor spam). 

How can I debug this? I'm not seeing any errors in the Contact record. 

Thanks for any help! I need HS to be able to send direct email to a Contact, of course. 

Thanks,

Neil

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @neilredding,

Email deliverability is sometimes a mystery. It's hard to identify the one cause for the issue. My first guess would be that the receiving email clients are probably picking up HubSpot's tracking and filtering these emails out before they get into the inbox.

HubSpot is tracking emails by embedding an invisible one-pixel image into the email message once it is sent. If the recipient has a very strict spam filter where they block any images or link tracking from loading in emails, your tracked email could be filtered as spam, see here.

Is there an Email hard bounce reason provided for these contacts? (You can check by navigating to the contact record, clicking View all properties in the left sidebar and searching Email hard bounce reason.)

Usually the only alternative is send these emails as plain emails – no tracking. That's the next thing I'd try and check. I'd assume that the issue does not persist when you disable sales email tracking.

Best regards!