Solving email delivery issues

Church Social is committed to ensuring high email delivery rates. However, it is still possible that periodically certain members will not receive some, or all, of the emails we send. This support article outlines some common issues to look for and solutions.

Marked as spam

If a user has ever marked a Church Social email as spam this will prevent them from receiving future emails. To reverse this first unmark the email as spam if it is still visible within the spam folder. Next, add our email addresses to your safe-senders list. Finally, please email us at support@churchsocial.com so we can enable this email address again.

Important: We strongly encourage users to never mark our emails as spam. This hurts our email reputation, and can actually make it more difficult for us to email users who legitimately want our emails. If you would prefer to not receive Church Social emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email we send.

Unsubscribed

Sometimes members unsubscribe from Church Social emails, and then later forget, or simply want to resubscribe. This can easily be done from within your Church Social account:

1. Login to Church Social
2. Click your profile icon (often your family picture) at the top right of the page. 
3. Now click on Settings  in the drop-down menu
4. The My Profile page should load. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the Email Preferences section
5. Here you will see all the Messages, Groups, Schedule and Prayer request notification settings. You can review the settings and put a checkmark in the box beside all the notifications you wish to receive as well as remove the checkmark from any groups you no longer wish to receive email notifications for.

Bouncing messages 

One of the more common reasons users do not receive Church Social emails is because their email address is bouncing. Email addresses bounce for a variety of reasons:

• The email address has been entered incorrectly into Church Social
• The user's email inbox is full
• The user's email provider is having technical difficulties
• An email provider has blocked Church Social on the assumption that we are spamming

Church Social provides administrators with a Bouncing email addresses report. However, all members can also see if their email address is bouncing by visiting the Settings  page in the app. If the email address is bouncing they will see a message asking them to update it to a valid email address. If the email address is correct, please contact us at support@churchsocial.com so we can investigate further.

Safe-senders list

We recommend that all Church Social users add our email addresses to their safe-senders list to help ensure they receive our emails without issue. To do this simply add  support@churchsocial.com  and notifications@churchsocial.com  to your email software's safe-senders list. If you are unsure how to do this, here is a helpful article from Constant Contact outlining how to do this for many popular email programs.

Issues with Bell

Bell email addresses have been known to fail more frequently than other mail service providers. This affects email accounts ending with sympatico.ca, bellnet.ca and bell.net. This happens because Bell often falsely identifies Church Social emails as spam. Further, since many of these members use desktop mail applications like Microsoft Outlook, these spam emails are never seen. Users must login to their online accounts in order to view them.

To solve this, have the member login to their online email account at webmail.bell.net. They will have been given an email password from Bell when they signed up. Then have them add both support@churchsocial.com  and notifications@churchsocial.com  to their "allowed email addresses" list. You can find specific instructions on how to do this here: http://support.bell.ca/internet/email/how-to-change-settings-in-bell-mail?step=2#displayStep.

If these steps do not fix the problem, please consider contacting Bell with this issue.