Troubleshooting Notifications

Email notifications are a convenient and popular way to keep your users informed about important file activities. Email can be a challenge to troubleshoot, so here's some guidance to help you dig into why notifications aren't being received.

Email notifications are generated in batches of activity, depending upon the interval configured in the notification. They may be sent as often as every 5 minutes, up to once per day. There is no guarantee that activity will be reported at the exact interval, because the emails must be generated and sent. An email generated every 5 minutes might arrive more than 5 minutes after the activity took place.

Ensure that the user has an email address set. Some users have an email address as their username yet leave the email field blank, which means your site doesn't have an address to send notifications. If this happens, copy the proper address into the email field for the user.

Similarly, check that the user has not been disabled. Notification emails are not sent to disabled users. If the affected user is disabled, enable their account.

If a user has set any email notifications to deliver on a Daily basis, those emails will only be generated during the hour specified in their Daily Email Notification Send Time. If the notification that isn't being received is set to Daily delivery, check the send time for the user.

Users can un-subscribe from any email notification. If they have done so, the notification will still exist, but will have a status that reflects it is disabled. When a notification is disabled for a user, emails will not be sent to that user.

Similarly, users can also permanently unsubscribe from all email notifications. When they have permanently unsubscribed, the email notification is not deleted, but will have a disabled status. When notifications are disabled for a user, emails will not be sent to that user. If a user permanently unsubscribed in error, contact support for assistance to reset their status.

If the user did not unsubscribe, but their notifications are disabled, the likely culprit is a hard bounce. A hard bounce is an email that has been returned to the sender due to a permanent error - most often, an invalid address. If a user's notifications have been permanently unsubscribed due to a hard bounce, first fix the problem that prevented the user's mail server from accepting the email. Once you have verified the email address will work, contact support to reset the email's status.

Email notifications are highly configurable. If a user isn't receiving notification emails, it's possible the email is not configured in the way you expect. Double-check the settings on the notification.

Email notifications can be limited in the types of file activities (upload, download, etc.) they include, does the notification have the proper activities selected?

Email notifications may apply only for a specific folder, or they may apply to any child folders of that folder. Is the notification configured with the expected setting for sub-folders?

You can limit the file names that will cause an email notification. Does the notification match all file names, or is there a limitation applied?

By default, email notifications do not include information about activities of the user being notified. Does your notification setup include the user's own activity?

When an administrator configures email notifications for someone else, the administrator can limit which users' activities will generate an email. Is the notification limiting which users to notify about?

Check the history for the notification's folder to verify that there is activity for the folder that should generate the notification emails. If activity doesn't appear in your History listing, an email notification will not be generated.

The Outbound Emails Log will show each time an email is generated, the recipient address, and the delivery status. If the system sent an email that wasn't received by the user, you can be confident that the user and the notification are correctly configured within Files.com, and the problem lies with the recipient's email server, email account, or spam filters.

Once you've verified that emails are being correctly generated by your site, you can troubleshoot the configuration of the recipient email server.

If you're using your own SMTP service rather than the one provided by Files.com, you should double-check that the settings are correct within your Files.com site. Your SMTP server may be reporting to Files.com that the email was sent but not completing the delivery. Check with your mail provider or SMTP server administrator to determine whether emails are being delivered to recipient servers.