When an email doesn't show up in Tender, it's almost always one of a few things. This article walks through them, explains heartbeats (Tender's own check that your forwarding works), and shows how to get an email's source if you need our help.
Check this first: was it sent by your staff?
Tender doesn't put discussions started by your own support staff (the owner included) in Pending: you wrote it, so you already know about it. A test email sent from your work address, or a customer email you forwarded that Tender didn't recognise as a forward, is in All instead. Test from a personal address that isn't on your support team. See Forwarding emails from customers to Tender for forwards.
Missing email
If someone says they emailed you and it's not in Tender, check these in order:
- Did it reach your support address? Look in the mailbox (or its archive) for
support@yourcompany.com. If it never arrived there, it couldn't be forwarded. Check the sender's spelling of your address. - Is the forward still on? Look at the category's box in Account & Settings › Email Setup (Sending & Receiving). With heartbeats on, it says whether Tender is receiving your email (see below). Make sure the address the customer used is listed in Users send email to this address.
- Is it in the spam folder? Click Spam in the dashboard's sidebar. If a real message is there, restore it: that also teaches Tender's filter. See Spam.
- Is it in Trash? Someone may have deleted it, by mistake or with the
#deleteemail command. - Did it go to another discussion? A reply to an older notification lands in that older discussion. Search for the sender's address with the dashboard's search box.
Still missing? Start a discussion with:
- who sent it (the From address),
- when it was sent,
- which address it was sent to,
- its subject,
and, best of all, the email's source.
Garbled text
If an email looks fine in your mail program but its text is garbled in Tender (strange symbols in place of accented letters, or encoded text such as =?utf-8?Q? in the subject), the email was probably sent with a missing or wrong character set, often by a contact form or an app rather than a person. Start a discussion with the email's source attached, and we'll look at it.
Heartbeats
What heartbeats are. A heartbeat is a short test email that Tender sends to each of your support addresses (the ones in Users send email to this address). If your forward works, the heartbeat comes straight back to Tender through it, and Tender knows your email is flowing. If it doesn't come back, something along the way is broken, and you can see it before your customers notice. Heartbeats never become discussions.
Turn them on. In Account & Settings › Email Setup (Sending & Receiving), under Email Delivery Settings, tick Heartbeats and click Save delivery settings. Tender then sends a heartbeat to each address every few hours (how often depends on your plan).
Read the result. Each category's box on the same page shows the last heartbeat for each of its addresses:
- Receiving Email from your address: the heartbeat came back. All is well.
- Awaiting Response: Tender has just sent one and is waiting for it.
- Errors: the heartbeat didn't come back within five minutes, or it came back to a different category. Check the forward for that address.
- No heartbeats yet: none has been sent.
Click Retry? to send a new heartbeat straight away, after you've fixed a forward for example.
Heartbeats come from heartbeat@tenderapp.com with the subject "Heartbeat for" and your address. If your forward is a filter (only some email is forwarded), make sure heartbeats match it. If you keep a copy of forwarded email, you can file them away with a rule in your mailbox.
Getting the source of an email
An email's source (or "original") is the whole message as it travelled, with all its headers. It tells us where an email went and why. To get it:
- Gmail: open the email, click the three dots (More) beside the Reply arrow, choose Show original, then Download original.
- Outlook: open the email in its own window, click File › Properties and copy the Internet headers. In Outlook on the web, click the three dots, then View › View message source.
- Apple Mail: select the email, then View › Message › Raw Source, and File › Save As.
- Thunderbird: select the email, then View › Message Source (Ctrl+U), and save it with File › Save Page As.
Save it as a text (or .eml) file and attach it to your discussion with us, rather than pasting it into the message.
If the email did reach Tender, you don't need your mail program: your staff can click Original on the message in Tender to see it as it arrived.