If you or a customer has not received an email sent from the Console, there are a few things to bear in mind.

Most emails will be delivered within a few hours from when they are scheduled, but this isn’t always the case. Delivery time can vary according to the time of day, the amount of other emails going out and the specific email providers that your recipients are using. Many email providers such as Hotmail will throttle the amount of email that can be delivered in a given time period, causing some emails to be delivered after 24hrs of the email being sent. 

Sometimes emails will end up in your spam folder so it’s worth checking here for your email and if you find it, it’s good practice to mark as "not spam" so that your email service provider is able to better identify your emails and not mark them as spam in the future.

If you are concerned the email may have bounced (where an email address or service provider has rejected or timed-out your broadcast delivery), you can check this by going to Send > Email > Sent Messages and clicking the email ID to the left of the email. You can then see the "hard bounces" and "soft bounces" which could indicate a delivery issue.

Hard bounce vs soft bounce

If your database contains email addresses that are invalid, the email you send will "hard bounce". A hard bounce is indicative of a permanent reason why your email cannot be delivered, as in the case of an invalid email address, or a domain name that does not exist.

Soft bounces point to a temporary problem with deliverability: the recipient’s inbox might be full or the email server is down. It could also simply be that the email you are sending is too large.

Airship cleans email lists automatically based on hard bounces and an algorithm for soft bounces. This shows the ESP that our clients are responsible senders and builds trust.

If you have a specific contact you want to check you can log into the Console and go to Contacts > Simple Search > Narrow Search by Personal Details.  

Enter the email address you want to check in the corresponding field, scroll to the bottom of the page and click search. This will bring up the contact record associated with the email address you entered. Click "view" to take a closer look. 

At the top of the page, you can then click "View Sent Broadcasts" to view the specific emails the contact has been sent.

Here you can filter your search by month or message type and verify the contact has received the email. 

And there you go, it’s as easy as that!