Troubleshooting & Heartbeats

Before you start troubleshooting, there are two things to be aware of:

• If you send an email to Tender from an email address that belongs to support staff (the owner is considered support staff), the new discussion will not show up in Pending, though it will show up in All Discussions. The Pending view in Tender only shows new discussions or replies made by customers. If the email is coming from your staff, Tender assumes you already know about it (you sent it after all), and thus it doesn't need to be highlighted in Pending.

• Our email server challenges all new servers it talks to. This sometimes delays first email a bit (up to an hour) until the new server has been cleared, but helps us fight spam. Once the server responds to the challenge, it becomes trusted, and other emails will go through normally, so you shouldn't see any delays after that first email.

If the above doesn't cover your problem, read on for more troubleshooting steps, but do not hesitate to contacts us if you have any questions.

Missing email

If you know someone sent you an email, but you haven't received it in Tender, you will need to contacts us in most cases. However, there are a few things you can check first:

Did your support address receive the email?

If someone said they emailed you at support@company.com but you haven't received it in Tender, you should first check if it arrived at support@company.com. If it didn't make it to support@company.com then it wouldn't have been forwarded to your Tender site.

Depending on your forwarding setup, you may keep a copy of all the emails, so this is the first place to look.

Did you manually forward the email?

Sometimes, forwards do not get parsed correctly. If that happened, the email will arrive in Tender from a support user, in which case it won't show in pending, even though it will show in "All Discussions".

Did you check the spam folder?

Sometimes, legitimate emails get incorrectly marked as spam.

Did you activate heartbeats?

See next section.

If you contacts us we'll ask if you've checked the above and we'll also need the following information:

That includes:

• Who sent the email (from field)
• When was it sent (date field)
• Who was it sent to (to field)
• What was the subject (subject field)

The best information you can give us is the email source.

Heartbeats

What are heartbeats?

Heartbeats are an optional setting that verifies email delivery to your Tender site is working.

Heartbeats are empty emails that Tender sends to each of your categories (support@company.com, feedback@company.com, etc). After an heartbeat is sent, we await to receive the email back. Once the email reaches support@company.com, it should be forwarded to tender2+XXXX@tenderapp.com, at which point Tender will receive it, and all is good.

If something is wrong, on our side or on yours, heartbeats will never be received by Tender and this helps us identify problems. In particular, we calculate how long it takes for each email to do the roundtrip (from us to you, and back to us), and get alerts whenever this time exceeds 1 minute. So if emails are not coming in, we can look at the history of heartbeats on your site, see if there have been delays before, compare with other sites, etc..

How to activate heartbeats

Go to Account & Settings > Email Setup. Scroll down, and you should find a section called Email Delivery Settings with a checkbox for Heartbeats. Check the box, and save your settings:

Getting the source of an email

GMail / Google Apps

Apple Mail

Thunderbird

Once you have obtained the source of the email, you need to copy it, paste it in a text file, and save the text file. You can then include this text file as an attachment in the discussion when you contacts us.