Quotations, invoices, packing slips, and other receipts can be emailed directly from Rentman. Unfortunately, it can happen that emails don't reach the customer. This article will explain what the cause could be and what you can do about it.

You can also change the sender address of your emails. Read our article on changing and verifying the sender address for your emails for more information.

Causes

There are several reasons why an email can't be received:

Spam

The e-mail was marked as spam. Often it's not clear what went wrong, as there is no explanation from the sending or receiving server.
Bounces

The sending or receiving server does not accept the email. This means that an email has bounced. This can come through Spam. In this category an email is considered as 'not accepted' and you often receive a statement from the sending or receiving server why the email has not been accepted.

Spam

In some cases, emails might be marked as spam by the receiving server.

How does spam work

A server rates each incoming mail with a score based on a number of variables. These variables are confidential because attackers would abuse this information to make their spam emails go through.

A perfect score is 100, and every error will lower the score. If the score is insufficient, the email is marked as spam.

The score of Rentman emails

Emails sent from Rentman have on average a very good score and are usually not marked as spam.

Of course, this score can vary based on the content of your emails. You can test the score of your emails using tools like MailTester.

How to improve your score

If your emails are being marked as spam, there are some actions you can take to improve your score:

Maintain a good HTML-text ratio

Receiving servers lower the score of emails with a heavy amount of HTML code as compared to the text. If you use a lot of HTML coding in your emails, consider reducing the coding or adding text.
Maintain a good images-text ratio

What previously said about HTML coding applies to images as well (both inside the text and attached).
Maintain a good links-text ratio

What previously said about HTML coding and images also applies to links to website pages.
Use a regular character size

Using a smaller or larger than average character size might lower your score.
Keep testing your score

Keep testing by using tools like MailTester and improve your email templates based on the feedback.

Tip: Suggest your clients to add you as a contact in their email server.

Another factor that might affect the score is that your displayed sender address does not match the actual address of the sender. The impact of this factor is smaller than the ones listed above. You can solve this by verifying your sender address, but we advise trying to improve your emails first.

Bounces

The server from the sending server (of Rentman) or the receiving server (of the customer) does not accept the email. The reason for this is often mentioned immediately by email or on the message screen in Rentman.

Find the message screen by clicking on the Message module. If you do not see this module, your user role does not have the correct rights.

Find the cause of a bounce

An email can be "Sent", "In queue", or "Delivering failed". These statuses mean the following:

Status: Sent

Meaning: The receiving server has marked the email as sent.

Status: In queue

Meaning: The sending server hasn't sent the email yet. This is probably because too many emails are being sent by multiple accounts in batches, with a delay to prevent an email being marked as spam. The sending server automatically tries to resend the emails, up until a defined limit. This cannot be cancelled.

Possible actions:

Waiting is often the best solution, since the email will generally be sent successfully.
Send the email from your own server.

Status: Delivering failed

Meaning: The email wasn't sent by the sending server or wasn't accepted by the receiving server. If you can't figure out the reason, please contact us. We may be able to determine the cause. Note: Rentman does not manage the receiving server; therefore, we may not be able to always determine a cause.

Possible actions:

View the common causes in the next section of the article.
Send the email from your own server.
Contact us.

Common causes of a bounce

Wrong email address

This is the most common reason. Please check the email address and try again.

Bounced by receiving server due to spam

This may be because the address of youraccount@rentmanclient.com is marked as a spam address. Please contact us if this is the case. A short-term solution is to send the email from your own server.

Bounced by sending server because address is on a blacklist

Our email client keeps a blacklist of email addresses, which were marked because of various reasons. The email address may have been offline for a short period of time in the past, or the inbox was full. Please contact us, if this happens, to let us remove this email address from the blacklist.

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