"My email wasn't delivered" checklist

When a contact says they never got an email — or you can't find yourself in your own test send — work through the four steps below in order: sender domain, contact status, sending quota, then automation logic. Each step ends with either a fix or a pointer to the deep-dive article. In almost every case, Reach behaved correctly and one of these four explains why the email was skipped.

Start every investigation the same way: open the global Activity page and look up the contact. It answers the core question — did Reach attempt to send email Y to contact X at all? See Email activity feed.

• A send event exists for that email: Reach sent it. The problem is on the receiving side — most often spam filtering — so start at step 1.
• No send event exists: Reach skipped or never attempted the send. Steps 2–4 cover why.

Step 1: Is your sender domain verified?

An unverified sender domain is the single biggest deliverability killer. Without SPF and DKIM records in place, mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook can't confirm you're allowed to send from your domain, so your email lands in spam or is rejected outright.

1. Open Email Settings and check your sender domain's verification status. Every record must show verified.
2. If any record is pending or failed, fix it before anything else — follow Verifying your sender domain, which includes a troubleshooting section for records that won't verify.
3. If the domain is verified and the activity feed shows a send event, ask the recipient to check their spam folder, and review Deliverability best practices — a new domain without warm-up, or a low-engagement list, can push even authenticated email to spam.

Domain verified and the email found in spam or inbox? Stop here. No send event in the activity feed? Continue to step 2.

Step 2: Is the contact unsubscribed or suppressed?

Reach enforces subscription status automatically: broadcasts and automations skip anyone who is unsubscribed or suppressed, even if they belong to the list or segment you targeted. This is the most common reason for a missing send event.

1. Open the contact's profile and check their subscription status.

2. Unsubscribed — the contact opted out, usually via the *|UNSUBSCRIBE_URL|* link. This is working as intended. Do not flip their status back yourself; new consent must come from the contact, for example by submitting one of your signup forms again. See Subscription status, consent & unsubscribes. Explained? Stop here.
3. Suppressed — Reach has stopped sending to this address to protect your deliverability, typically after a hard bounce or a spam complaint. Suppressed contacts stay suppressed; the suppression is a deliverability guardrail, not an opt-out you can reverse by editing the contact. The same article explains why. Explained? Stop here.

Contact is subscribed but still no send event? Continue to step 3.

Step 3: Did you hit your sending quota?

Each plan includes an email quota per billing period, and when you reach it, Reach stops sending further email until the quota resets or you increase it. The telltale symptom is sends that stop partway through a broadcast or partway through a busy day, while earlier sends went out fine.

1. Open the Subscription tab of Email Settings and compare emails sent against your quota for the current period.

2. If you're at the limit, that's your answer. Your options — upgrading your plan or topping up — plus what happens to over-limit broadcast and automation emails, are covered in Email sending limits & your plan.

Quota was the cause? Stop here. Plenty of quota left? Continue to step 4.

Step 4: Did an automation condition skip the email?

If the missing email comes from an automation, the most common "missing" email is actually correct behavior: the contact entered the flow but a condition step routed them past the email. The classic example is an abandoned-checkout reminder skipped because the contact completed their purchase.

1. Open the flow and go to its activity view, then find the contact to see exactly how far they got.
2. If the contact never entered the flow at all, the trigger didn't fire — wrong list, a form that isn't connected, or a pixel event that wasn't recorded for an unidentified visitor.
3. If they entered but skipped the email, trace their path and check each condition against their profile data at the time they reached that step.

Automation activity and troubleshooting walks through each of these symptom-by-symptom, including how to test a trigger yourself with a test address. Diagnosed? Stop here.

Still stuck?

If the contact is subscribed, your domain is verified, you have quota, and the automation activity shows the email should have sent but there's still no send event, contact support via the in-app Help entry in the top navigation. Include the contact's email address, the broadcast or flow name, and roughly when the send should have happened — that's enough for us to trace the message.