Why an email didn’t send

A send that comes up short is unnerving mid-campaign — and the cause is rarely obvious from the campaign screen. Work down these checks in order; the first two explain most of them.

Work out what happened

1. Open the campaign and check its status

   Go to Outreach and open the campaign. A campaign is in one of five states: draft, scheduled, sending, sent or cancelled. One still sitting in draft never went anywhere.

   

2. Compare Recipients against Audience

   Audience is who matched your filters when the list was built. Recipients is who was actually emailed. A gap between the two is normal, and is nearly always unsubscribes and hard bounces.

3. Check the sending domain is verified

   An unverified domain blocks the whole send, and you see Sender not verified on the campaign itself rather than an error in your inbox. Open Email Configuration and check the domain under Email Streams & Domains. The warning also lists which domains you do have verified, so the quickest fix is often to send from one of those instead.

4. Check who your audience actually covers

   If your role sits at local level, your audience only ever includes people in your own electorates — even when the filter looks organisation-wide. A state organiser and a local organiser building the same list will get different numbers, and that’s working as intended.

   

5. Look up one person who missed out

   Open them under People and check their email preferences and their bounce history. Preferences are per category, so someone who has opted out of one kind of email still receives the others.

Merge fields and fallbacks

A missing first name won’t stop a send, but it will produce an awkward greeting. Give every merge field a fallback:

Hi {{ person.first_name | default: "there" }},

Thanks for backing the campaign in {{ person.federal_electorate }}.

Check the result against a real person with Send Test Email before the campaign goes out. The full list of available fields is in the Liquid reference.

Before you resend. Check the audience first. A resend to the same list means everyone who did receive it gets it twice — the fastest way to earn unsubscribes.

Fault finding

Symptom	Cause and fix
"Sender not verified" and nothing sends	The domain your from address uses isn’t verified with Postmark. Verify it under Email Configuration, or send from a domain that’s already verified — the warning lists them.
A local organiser sees a smaller count than head office	Division scoping. A local role only reaches people in that local group’s electorates. Someone with a state or national role has to build the list if it needs to go wider.
People in the list have no email address	They stay in the list and are skipped at send time. Find them under Data Quality and fix the records.
Someone who wants the emails isn’t getting them	Check for a hard bounce on their record. A hard bounce excludes them until the address is corrected — resending won’t clear it.
The send finished far quicker than expected	Check Recipients, not Audience. A small recipient count on a large list usually means the filter was narrower than intended.