Troubleshooting email campaigns

Issues with email sending

If your subscribers are not correctly receiving campaign emails, please check the following:

• The emails are sent out using a scheduled task that is executed every 1 minute by default. You can check the status of the scheduled task in the Scheduled tasks application.

• Go to Settings -> System -> Emails or Administration -> SMTP servers and make sure your SMTP servers are configured correctly. See Configuring SMTP servers for details. You can try sending a test email on the Email tab of the System application.

• Go to the Email queue application. You can find an error message for individual emails that failed to send. Email queue keeps attempting to send failed emails once a minute for the first hour. After you resolve the technical issue, you can resend all failed emails by clicking Resend all failed.

• Make sure you are using a correct email addresses.

• Make sure the emails are not being blocked by an anti-spam software.

• Email debugging can be helpful when solving problems with campaign emails. To enable email debugging, add the following keys to the configuration/appSettingssection of your project’s web.config file:

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    <add key="CMSLogEmails" value="true"/>
    <add key="CMSDebugEmails" value="true"/>
  
  
    

  • CMSLogEmails - logs all sent emails to the ~/App_Data/logemails.log file. The log contains each email’s recipient and subject.

  • CMSDebugEmails - disables sending of emails to the actual recipients. The system only logs emails into the event log. Helpful if you need to test the functionality, but do not want the emails to actually reach the recipients.

    • To view the event log, open the Event log application.
    • The emails are logged as Information type events.
    • The Event code column contains the recipient’s address.
    • The system randomly generates Sending failed for <recipient’s email address> errors to simulate sending errors.

Issues with unsubscription links

If your unsubscription links are not resolving correctly, check that the Base URL property of the given email campaign is set correctly according to the domain name of your website. To configure this property:

1. Open the Email marketing application.
2. Edit () the email campaign and switch to the Configuration tab.

Issues when sending campaign emails to a large number of subscribers

Restricting logging of sent campaign emails

By default, the system logs an event log entry for every sent campaign email. When mailing out to a very large number of subscribers, this may lead to a cluttered event log or even website performance problems.

You can disable logging of campaign email changes (including send events) by adding the following key to the /configuration/appSettingssection of your project’s web.config file:

<add key="CMSLogNewsletterIssueEvents" value="false" />

Opened campaign emails not being tracked

This can be caused by an incorrectly configured email campaign. Make sure you double-check the configuration. 

Another cause of email campaign links not being tracked is an incorrect tracking link. This can be caused by your site not being accessible without the ‘www’ prefix. For example, you can access your site via www.example.com, but not via example.com. To resolve this for a particular campaign:

1. Open the Email marketing application.

2. Edit () the campaign and switch to the Configuration tab.

3. Change the Base URL field to:

   • www.example.com
     use your domain instead of the example

4. Save.

Custom macros in sent campaign emails not resolving correctly

Custom macrosused in campaign emails may not resolve correctly if they take macros dependent on subscriber context as parameters. For example, if you’re using a custom macro that takes the Subscriber.SubscriberFirstName macro as an argument, you need to call the custom macro with the subscriber resolver:

{% CustomMacro(SubscriberFirstName)|(resolver)subscriber %}

Note that this inconsistency occurs only in sent emails, email previews resolve macros differently.