I'm one of the administrators on Photochallenge Focus (along with Michael O'Byrne). We run two photo challenges concurrently. One of our members received the invitation to one of the challenges but did not receive the invitation to the other. This has happened at least twice recently. We've. asked her to check her junk folder but they were not routed to that folder. Any thoughts on how this happens (receiving some of the invitations but not all)?
Thanks for reaching out, and please send my regards to Michael!
There can be different reasons why individual emails are not delivered, even if other invitations to the same email address arrive successfully. For example:
- The receiving mail server may temporarily reject an email, e.g. due to rate limiting, greylisting, or temporary server issues.
- Spam or security filters may block an individual email before it even reaches the recipient's inbox or junk folder.
- Mail providers may evaluate each message individually, so even similar invitations can sometimes be treated differently.
- The recipient's mailbox may temporarily be unavailable or full.
- Especially with company or organization email addresses, additional mail gateways or security systems may filter or quarantine messages before they reach the actual mailbox.
- Content-based spam filtering: Email providers evaluate each message individually. The title of the Photo Challenge is included in the invitation email, so differences in the challenge title or other message content can potentially cause one invitation to be filtered while another is delivered normally.
The best way for us to investigate this is if you contact us at support@pollunit.com and provide the email address that did not receive the invitation. We can check the email delivery logs to see whether anything unusual happened on the way to the recipient's mail server and also check the response we received from that server.
Please note that we can only investigate emails sent within the last 5 days. For privacy reasons, we do not retain these email delivery logs for longer than that.
If possible, please also let us know which challenge invitation was not received and approximately when it was sent. That will make it easier for us to locate the relevant delivery attempt.
Thank you for your detailed response! Unfortunately the said email was sent out more than 5 days ago so you will not be able to investigate. Our next invitations will be sent on September 20. We will communicate with this particular member at that time to see if one of their invitations is missing. We will report back to you as soon as we find out the next time this happens. Thanks again!