Understanding Email Delivery

Email delivery is a very tricky task which is why PTOffice uses a state of the art email delivery system that handles millions of emails a year with over 99% delivery rate.

That being said, the occasional “I never got it” is a battle cry from the membership while the email’s analytics say differently. So what gives? Did they get it or not? It depends… Here’s a quick tutorial on how an email delivery (and receiving) system works which should help clear up some of the confusion.

To best understand how it all works, let’s look at the following diagram…

As you can see, an email is considered “successfully delivered” if the Recipient’s email server accepts it. The reality is that the recipient’s server may still still fail to deliver the email to the end user’s inbox for a multitude of reasons – poor user account setup, a user inadvertently marking the sender as SPAM, a server’s firewall, company email policies and the ever present SPAM folder.

Thus, you have a situation where your email analytics say that it was delivered, but your end user is stating they never received it. So now what needs to be done. Here are some suggestions…

Be sure the end user has checked their SPAM folder.
Be sure the end user lists email@ptoffice.com as a known and friendly sender.
Have the user contact their email server administrator to see if they have been blocking it and why.

NOTE: Many organization's own their own domain and have domain specific email addresses. ie. myname@mycompany.com. Many organization's also have custom email filters applied to email delivery and may require the Email Administrator to modify their filters to allow all emails to be delivered. You can pass the following information to the Email Administrator to help them allow delivery of your emails:

"Coming From" email address - email@ptoffice.com
"Coming From" sending IPs - 52.24.203.188 & 147.253.223.108

We use private sending IP pools to increase the chances of a successful email delivery and to avoid being marked as SPAM by others in a publicly shared sending IP pool. PTOffice currently has a 99.05% successful acceptance rate of all emails.