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Not sure if anyone has encountered this, but thought I'd post a question to see if anyone has any bright ideas.

TL;DR

Cannot get mailchimp to send to gmail-based emails or google app managed domain emails. No, they're not ending up in spam folder or promotions folder. The emails just don't arrive at all.

What I Did

  1. Set up a campaign in mailchimp
  2. Set up a list with my own email addresses including hotmail, gmail and an email using my google app managed domain.
  3. Sent out the campaign

What happened

  1. hotmail received the email
  2. gmail did not receive email (did not even end up in spam, or promotions tab)
  3. google app email did not receive email (did not even end up in spam or promotions tab)
  4. Looked on mailchimp and all emails were reported as delivered. No soft or hard bounces.

What I tried

  1. Turned on domain authentication in mailchimp by adding DKIM records on my domain... didn't help
  2. Turned off domain authentication... didn't help
  3. Unfortunately, cannot contact mailchimp support because I'm on the free plan.

Any insight or help is appreciated.

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  • 2
    Have you contacted MailChimp? afterall, its a 3rd party service... – Simon Hayter♦ Feb 9 '16 at 11:10
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    @Simon Hayter: They don't allow service support queries for the free service subscription (which is the plan that i'm using). Updating my question with the added info – awei Feb 10 '16 at 6:47
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Contact Mail Chimp..

There are a lot of reasons why email are not being received and the top 1 is that the email was rejected.

Gmail will reject most emails when the sender IP have no Reverse DNS information (example IP 1.2.3.4 must have a corresponding 4.3.2.1.xxxx.xx)

Mails will also be rejected if the IP or reverse IP have no matching host answering to the query.

Gmail expect mails to be signed and they are looking at it in the headers. Sometimes Gmail will only accept mails sent via HTTPS connections.

I don't know how mails are send by Mailchimp, are they being sent by MailChimp servers or by your hosting account? If they are being sent by MailChimp server, they are the only one who can fix/solve the issue since Gmail replies will be sent to them on why the email was blocked

You can use http://mxtoolbox.com/ to check for problems with your webhost mail configuration.

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The actual resolution came down to changing my DNS manager. The original cpanel to manage DNS provided by nativespace.com was not working for whatever reason. After I switched my DNS manager to godaddy.com and reconfigured MX records, the email started working.

I upvoted answer provided by @Vhortex for his suggestion on using http://mxtoolbox.com which helped in debugging. But the above was the actual fix required.

After the DNS switch, emails stopped going into a black hole and ended up in my spam folder which was a vast improvement. Then, I added some DKIM and SPF records on godaddy.com. Mails are still getting sent to spam, but at least they're getting delivered.

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  • DKIM and SPF records will tell Gmail who you are so mails are accepted. They will still go to spam since they lack the authenticated header, this is a false positive but Google says if people you are sending emails to keeps on clicking "not spam", your email server will be flag as clean, The other solution you can get is to instruct people to bookmark your email address used for mailing, after doing this, you will only land on the spam folder less than 5% of the time – Vhortex Feb 24 '16 at 3:37
  • @Vhortex thx for the insight. – awei Feb 24 '16 at 6:29
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I have had this problem for three years. Gmailers tell me they do not get my emails. I don't get them to my Gmail account. But I just looked in "All" and it was there.

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  • You are saying that gmail just puts it in a different "all" folder where nobody sees it? – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Mar 30 '18 at 18:18
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For others who may be as confused as I:

Check "ALL MAIL" in gmail

Sometimes email doesnt go into the tabs gmail sets up (primary, social, updates, etc), for whatever illogical reason.

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