A reader never got the confirmation email

Start on your subscriber list rather than in your own inbox. Whether the address is there at all, and what status it is on, answers this in one look, and each of the possible answers points somewhere different. This page is ordered by how often each turns out to be the real one.

Double opt-in has to be on for any of this to apply. With it off, a signup is active immediately and no confirmation is ever sent, which is the switch in Settings under Subscribers.

Does the reader appear on your list?

Search your subscriber list for the address. Pending means the confirmation was sent, and the problem is between our mail and their inbox. Absent means the form never accepted them, and nothing was ever sent.

An address that is not there at all has one of two explanations, and both are on this page: the domain was refused at the form, or signups on the account are paused because a trial has ended, which returns a message about signups being closed and writes nothing. Check the address you are searching for against the one the reader gave you, character by character. A pending row with a different spelling is the commonest ending to this whole investigation.

Is the part after the at sign right?

Issue Mint checks the domain on every signup form before accepting an address, and a domain that cannot receive mail is refused in the field while the reader is still looking at it.

The message names the problem: we cannot find a mail server for that address, is the part after the at sign spelled right. So gmial.com never becomes a pending subscriber and never gets an email, which is the point, because the alternative is a confirmation that hard bounces and a reader who never learns why nothing came. The domain check covers what it can and cannot test, and the honest limit is this: it answers about the domain, never the mailbox. A typo before the at sign, ada@example.com for adar@example.com, passes every check available and produces a confirmation that goes to nobody.

Which inbox did it go to, and from whom?

The confirmation arrives carrying your newsletter’s name as the sender, with your own address as the reply-to, and it is sent through Issue Mint’s own mail rather than through your sending account.

That last part is deliberate: a reader can be confirming on the day you launch, long before you have looked at how your issues are sent, and a confirmation that waited for your setup would be a confirmation that never arrived. The practical consequence is that the message does not come from your domain, so ask the reader to look in spam and, on Gmail, in the promotions tab. The link inside it is good for seven days and then stops working, so a reader digging out a fortnight-old email needs to sign up again rather than click it.

Was that address already on your list?

A form submission from an address you already hold does not always send anything, and the message on screen is not always the one you would guess.

An already active subscriber is told they are already subscribed, and no email goes out. An address that previously hard bounced or reported spam anywhere on Issue Mint is answered exactly as if it had worked, and nothing is sent, because telling a stranger their address was suppressed would reveal something about somebody else’s list. An address sitting on an import that is waiting for review gets the same neutral answer, so that signing up again cannot be a route around the review. If a reader insists they signed up and saw a friendly message, one of these three is usually why.

The one reminder, three days later

A reader who never confirmed gets exactly one nudge, 3 days after signing up, with a different subject line from the first email.

Only signups from the last 14 days qualify, so a pending row older than that will never get one. The reminder is also skipped for an address that has been suppressed since, and for an account whose trial has ended, on the grounds that both of those are us initiating contact rather than answering it. After that one email, nothing further is ever sent to a pending row. It stays on your list, out of every send and out of your active count, until you delete it.

Getting the reader on the list another way

Two routes, and which is appropriate depends on how sure you are of the address.

The reader submitting your form again resends the same confirmation to the same row, which is the right answer when they have lost the email. Adding them by hand is the other, and it honours the newsletter’s double opt-in setting rather than overriding it, telling you before you press the button whether that person will be asked to confirm or added straight away. If you cannot honestly say the person asked for your newsletter, leave the setting alone and let them sign up.

Still stuck

Write to us with the newsletter and the exact address, and we will tell you what happened to the message we sent.

We can see whether a confirmation left, when, and whether the receiving mailbox rejected it and what it said while doing so. That is the one part of this neither you nor the reader can see, and it is usually a single sentence from their mail provider that settles the whole question.