Email Deliverability

Almost everything a group does by email depends on mail actually arriving: dues reminders, announcements, event notices, the code a member needs to sign in. Mail providers decide whether to accept your group’s mail partly on how its past mail was received, so an address that keeps rejecting messages, or a member who marks them as spam, costs more than that one member’s mail — it makes the next message to everyone a little less likely to land. GroupFlow hears back from the mail service about every message it sends, and acts on what it hears instead of going on sending to an address that isn’t working. That means a member sometimes stops receiving your group’s email, and the reason is recorded on their record so an organizer can see what happened. This page explains the rules, where to look, and what the member does about it.

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What the mail service reports back

Three kinds of answer matter, and GroupFlow treats them differently.

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Temporary bounces, and the third one

A temporary bounce pauses the member’s email rather than stopping it, because the problem is usually the member’s mailbox rather than their address. How long depends on what came back: a full mailbox pauses for ten days, a server that refused or timed out for four, anything else for two. When the pause ends, GroupFlow sends to them again as normal. A member whose mail keeps bouncing is a different matter. On the third temporary bounce within thirty days, GroupFlow turns their email off rather than pausing again. At that point the address needs attention, not another wait.

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Permanent bounces and spam complaints

Both turn the member’s email off straight away. A permanent bounce means the address is wrong — a typo at signup, or a work address that no longer exists. A spam complaint means the member, or their provider, has said they don’t want this mail; continuing to send it is both unwelcome and damaging to the group’s other mail.

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Where an organizer sees it

Every pause and every switch-off writes a note on the member’s record, saying what came back and when. Open the member from Members & Users and the notes are at the foot of the Overview tab. The switch itself is on the member’s Edit details tab, in the Contact section: a toggle labelled “Emails to this member are enabled (disable only for unique circumstances)”. A member whose email is currently paused rather than off has a line beneath it saying when deliveries resume. Both need the Members Management permission — see Admin Permissions.

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Turning it back on

The toggle is an organizer’s to set, so a member can’t re-enable their own email. Turn it back on once the underlying problem is fixed — and fix it first, or the next message bounces and switches it off again.

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What a member does about their own email

If a member tells you they have stopped receiving the group’s mail:

• Send them to the Email Deliverability page on your own site, at /help/unblock-email. It names your group’s two sending addresses — its membership address and its events address — and walks the member through un-marking the mail as spam, adding those addresses to their contacts, checking their notification preferences, and writing to GroupFlow support for a test message. It is the one page that can tell them the addresses, because they are your group’s.
• Check the address on their account. They can usually change it themselves from their account page; some groups keep that change to organizers, in which case correct it in the Contact section. A typo, or an old work address, is the commonest cause.
• Look in the junk or spam folder. If the group’s mail is there, moving it to the inbox and marking it as not spam teaches their provider to accept the next one.
• Empty a full mailbox. Nothing GroupFlow does will get a message into a mailbox with no room in it.
• Ask an organizer to turn their email back on. This is the step members don’t know about, and no amount of fixing their mailbox substitutes for it.

A member who marked a message as spam has told their provider not to accept the group’s mail. Un-marking it helps, but their provider may keep filtering for a while, so expect it to take a few messages to settle.