Why didn’t my contacts get my newsletter?

Starting in February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo are rolling up new authentication requirements which require using a custom DKIM authenticated domain with DMARC reinforced.

GetResponse strongly advises all senders to use emails addresses from own sending domains as a from field, and to configure both DKIM and DMARC.

For additional details on these modifications, refer to our blog post:
Gmail and Yahoo’s Authentication Changes: All You Need to Know

There are a few possible reasons why a newsletter message didn’t send. Check the steps below to see why this might have happened.

Outstanding charges on your account

You can check that under Profile >> Billing.

  • If you can see a Pay the balance button, that means your account has a negative balance and is limited. To start sending messages again, settle your payment.
  • If the Pay the balance button isn’t there, everything’s in order. You can go to the next step.

Identity verification

Another reason why message sending can be blocked is if our Compliance Team are conducting an identity review on your account.

Messages will not send until the review concludes. Learn more about account reviews.

If you don’t see a review notification on your Dashboard, your account is active. Go on to the next step.

Status of your message

It’s a good idea to double-check if your message isn’t scheduled, or saved as a draft. You can verify this by going to Email Marketing.

  • If you see Scheduled under message status, that means that you set the message to go out on a specific date and time. Please wait for the scheduled date to see if it went out correctly.
newsletter scheduled notification.
  • If you see Sending under message status, that means the message is still going out. Please wait for the process to finish before checking the statistics.
  • If you don’t see your message under Newsletters, it might be saved as a draft. To check this, go Drafts.

If you’re using scheduling features such as Time Travel or Perfect Timing, please note that the message can take up to 24 hours to send. These settings rely on testing to help determine the best time of day to send the message to your contacts.

From email address

Double check that the From email address – the email address that you use for sending – doesn’t come with a DMARC warning. Email addresses that have adopted the DMARC Policy may bounce when being sent through a server. Certain public domain email addresses – such as Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Mail.ru, – will return a DMARC warning.

If you’re using a public domain email address and you see a DMARC warning, it may be a good idea to switch to a private domain email address. This will improve your deliverability.

Recipients selection

Another possible reason why a contact hasn’t received your message is because they were not on the recipient list. It’s a good idea to double-check that the message was sent to their address.

You can display these contacts using Advanced search. Use the Message sent condition to check if the message went out to your intended contacts. If they’re not there, re-use the message and select them as recipients. Learn more about using advanced search conditions.

Recipients’ email addresses

If a contact reports that they haven’t received your message – and you’re unable to locate them using the methods above – it’s possible that their email address is permanently unreachable. This will result in a hard bounce. Another possibility is that the contact has unsubscribed, or was removed from your list. In each case, their email address is removed from your list of active contacts, and moved to inactive contacts instead. This means that they are no longer part of your lists, and cannot be used as recipients.

Learn how to find inactive contacts.

If you’re certain that a contact belongs to your active contacts, and they still report not receiving your message, please advise them to:

  • check the other folders of their inbox, in addition to the ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder
  • add your from email address to their address book
  • whitelist the GetResponse IP spaces:

104.160.64.0/24
104.160.65.0/24
104.160.67.128/25
104.160.68.224/27
104.160.69.0/26

Other issues

Our Customer Success Team will be happy to help. Make sure you have the following information on hand to speed things along:

  • the name of the message
  • the list(s) you have selected as recipients for your message
  • the email address of the individual contact who did not receive your message (or a few examples if there are more than one)