Troubleshooting newsletters

Issues with e-mail sending

If your subscribers are not correctly receiving newsletter e-mails, please check the following:

  • The newsletter issues are sent out using a scheduled task that is executed every 1 minute by default. You may need to wait for up to 2 minutes before you receive newsletter issue e-mail. You can check the status of the scheduled task in the Scheduled tasks application.

  • Go to Settings -> System -> E-mails 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 e-mail on the E-mail tab of the System application.

  • Go to Newsletter -> Newsletter queue. If some e-mail failed, you will find the error message here. After you resolve the technical issue, you can resend all failed e-mails by clicking Resend all failed.

  • If your newsletters are configured to use the e-mail queue, go to the E-mail queue application. Any e-mails lost due to errors can be monitored and re-sent here.

  • Make sure you are using the correct e-mail addresses.

  • Make sure the newsletter issues are not being blocked by anti-spam software.

  • Newsletter e-mail debugging can be helpful when solving problems with newsletter e-mails. To enable newsletter debugging, add the following keys to the configuration/appSettingssection of your project’s web.config file:

    
    
    
      <add key="CMSLogEmails" value="true"/>
      <add key="CMSDebugEmails" value="true"/>
    
    
      
    • CMSLogEmails - logs all sent e-mails to the ~/App_Data/logemails.log file. The log contains each e-mail’s recipient and subject.

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

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

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

  1. Open the Newsletters application.
  2. Edit () the newsletter and switch to the Configuration tab.

Note: Newsletters only generate valid unsubscription links when sending issues to actual subscribers. Unsubscription links do not work in draft e-mails, since the recipients are not linked to subscribers in the system.

Issues when sending newsletters to a large number of subscribers

Sending newsletters to contact groups

If you have user roles or contact groups as subscriber of your newsletters, it is highly recommended to send the newsletter issues via the e-mail queue. To set a newsletter to use the newsletter queue:

  1. Open the Newsletters application.
  2. Edit () the newsletter and switch to the Configuration tab.
  3. Enable the Send issues via e-mail queue property.
  4. Click Save.

Restricting logging of sent newsletters

By default, the system logs an event log entry for every sent newsletter issue. When mailing out issues 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 newsletter issue 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" />