Email Settings Troubleshooting/FAQs

• I have Personal/System Emails Queuing

• Why won't my emails show in my sent items?

• What's the host server/name for my email type?

• Why won't images show in my signature?

• How do I stop my emails showing as spam?

• Why are my Emails taking so long to send?

   

• My Email looks different in Outlook

Queuing Personal/System Emails

Personal Emails

If you log in and are greeted with a box with a message about queuing emails, it means that emails sent from Firefish haven't been able to send.

This usually happens when you have changed your email password on Outlook but haven't updated it on the settings pages of Firefish yet!

Firefish needs to have your current email login details so that it can send emails on your behalf and log them on Firefish records as actions. However, Firefish does not have permission to change your email password for you and will not be able to detect when it has been changed - just when it's wrong!

Here's how to check your email settings for Office 365:

1. Go to your name at the top right of the screen and select My Account.

2. Select Email Settings & Log Out

3. On your browser open up a New Incognito Window

4. Head back to Firefish > Hello, Name > My Account > Email Settings.

5. Hit the Login button, this will then prompt you for a email password. Please ensure you use the most up to date password.

Here's how to check your email settings for Gmail:

1. Go to your name at the top right of the screen and select My Account.

2. Select Email Settings & Log Out

3. Select Sign in With Google

4. Make sure you give Firefish access to the following permissions to ensure you can use Email and Calendar functionality within Firefish:

You should get a 'Completed Successfully' message if all details have been entered correctly.

Once you have updated your password on Firefish, these emails will be sent and the box will disappear when the queue has been cleared. Please note, the queue doesn't always clear immediately.

System / General Emails

Super users - remember that you're responsible for keeping your general email settings up-to-date too! If the general email settings aren't correctly set up then no emails will send, even from users' own accounts.

If the email password is changed for your general email inbox, you must update your system email password on Firefish as soon as possible to ensure there will be no issues for your users.

You can do this by carrying out the following steps:

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > System Email and confirm your email service details are correct.

2. Hit the Log Out button

3. On your browser open up a New Incognito Window

4. Head back to Firefish > Settings > Integrations > System Email.

5. Hit the Login button, this will then prompt you for a email password. Please ensure you use the most up to date password.

6. Enter an email address in the 'Send Test Email To' field then click 'Test & Save Settings'.

You should get a 'Completed Successfully' message if all details have been entered correctly.

Queued Emails - Deletion

If you have emails in your queue that has been sent from a deactivated user, the emails sitting in the queue will automatically be deleted 14 days after your user has been deactivated.

Why Wont My Emails Show in My Sent Items?

Depending on your email settings, you may see emails sent through Firefish in your email sent items.

Whether emails are saved in your sent items is actually determined by the way the mail server has been set up and not something controlled by Firefish.

Firefish sends the email to the outbox, and it then depends on the settings in place whether this email is the saved in sent items or deleted. If your emails are not displaying in your sent items, this is something that your email provider will be able to assist with.

If so, it's possible that the connected account is configured to use POP or IMAP for incoming messages, then outgoing messages isn't using Outlook.com's SMTP server to send the message. It's using the connected account's SMTP server, which means, the Sent folder on that remote service will have a copy of the outgoing message.

Your Outlook.com mailbox won't see the outgoing message, and hence, won't have a copy in the Outlook.com Sent folder

What's My Email Host Server Name?

In Outlook, go to File > Info you'll see which type of email server you're using

If you see IMAP or POP you should use the Custom SMTP option in Firefish.

Email Host Name

You'll find your host name in Outlook under Account Settings in File for Outlook 2010 and 2013.

If you're using Outlook 2007 this is in Tools > Account Settings

Opening Account Settings will let you see the mailboxes you have access to.

Double click into the mailbox and a further screen will open:

You’ll see the server name here which you can copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V). For SMTP (IMAP or POP) addresses, use the Outgoing Server address.

Note you won't be able to right click to copy and paste, so make sure you use the keyboard shortcuts

If you're struggling to find these details, or you're using a different email account contact your IT provider or mail provider who'll be able to supply these details

Why wont images show in my email signature?

Have you sent an email through Firefish and instead of your company logo showing on the bottom of the email they see this:

A common reason for this is that when you put your signature on Firefish, you copied and pasted your signature directly onto the signature form.

The way to avoid this is to ensure you upload your logo on Firefish, instead of copying and pasting. When you're pasting the text or body of your signature over, remember to use the "Paste From Word" tool:

This will remove any formatting that may have been carried over from your signature.

Once you've got your signature text in place, you'll be ready to upload your images! You can do this by clicking the Image icon on the toolbar:

Then click Browse Server and upload your images from your PC.

Don't forget to click on “Test & Save Settings” when you're done! Once you've completed this action your signature will be ready for use.

How do I stop my emails showing as spam?

We know how important email marketing is for recruitment. We’ve made it really easy to send bulk emails through Firefish - but with great power comes great responsibility.

We take spam seriously and have some guidelines we ask you to follow when you’re using the email marketing features in Firefish.

Why does it matter?

If someone reports your email as spam, an automatic message is sent to their ISP. If enough of these messages accumulate, the ISP will block all emails sent via Firefish. For this reason, if we get a high volume of spam reports, we may suspend or disable your access to the system.

How do I avoid my emails being reported as spam?

First, you need to confirm that you have permission to contact the people who own the email addresses. There are a few examples below of what constitutes permission and what doesn’t.

Try to personalise your content as much as possible. Remind recipients why you’re making contact, e.g., “We met at the Recruitment Expo last May” or “You registered an interest in marketing jobs on our website”.

You’ll also need to be vigilant about updating the system if someone calls or emails you to say they don’t want to receive further emails. Failing to opt someone out of email contact as requested can result in eventual legal action, so make sure to keep your database up-to-date!

You may also be required to apply a SPF Record to your DNS Settings to prevent your emails being marked as spam. If you are using Firefish as your email provider then please get in touch with us as we should be able to correct this for you. If you aren't using Firefish as your provider then we recommend you contacting your chosen email provider for this information.

What’s okay and what’s not?

Here are some examples to help you decide whether or not it’s okay to send a bulk email to someone:

OK

• People who have opted in to email contact as part of your recruitment process

• People who have opted in to email contact over the phone, by email, or in person

• People who have used your services and given you an email address to receive updates

Not OK

• Lists of email addresses you bought from a third party

• Email addresses pulled from LinkedIn, websites, or other sources without consent

How do I stop my server being blacklisted?

We understand how important it is to keep candidates engaged, and we know that job alerts and bulk emails can be really useful tools for achieving this. We also realise that recruiters will be worried about having their email server blacklisted, so we’ve put together some guidelines on how to prevent this from happening, and what we’re doing to help you.

Why does it matter?

Email blacklists are shared between companies as a way of identifying senders who are guilty of distributing unwanted messages; whether that’s because they are considered malicious, unsolicited, or spam. If your email server ends up on a blacklist, your emails will at best be marked as spam and go straight to junk folders, or at worst be blocked altogether and go undelivered.

How do I avoid my email server being blacklisted?

The best practice for avoiding being put on a blacklist builds on the guidance to avoid being marked as spam. Other contributing factors to why an email server might be blacklisted include:

• How many emails are being sent at once (the volume of recipients per email)

• How often bulk emails are sent from that email server

• Email content (lots of links or known spam keywords are red flags)

• If there is an option to unsubscribe within the email

• How other recipients have responded to emails from this server previously (reply, delete, mark as spam, etc.)

• If the server appears on other blacklists

What does Firefish do to help me?

As well as providing guidance to our users, Firefish helps you to avoid having your email server blacklisted by using a technique called email throttling. This means that we’ll stagger the bulk emails and job alerts that go out from Firefish, sending an individual email to each recipient, instead of one email with lots of recipients, perhaps in blind copy. This is also what lets us use mail merge fields to automatically customise each email to the recipient. With so many bulk emails going out during the day, this could result in a rather large email queue. To ease this, we’ll make sure that job alerts are sent out of hours, usually around 2am, so that these should all be sent by the time you’re back in the office and sending more emails.

Why are my Emails taking so long to send?

All emails sent from Firefish are sent out at a rate of 30 every minute - meaning the system processes up to 1800 emails every hour (cumulative for all users, not individually). Large volume Bulk Emails will cause your email queue to back up so try scheduling these for the end of the day or during quiet periods.

My Email looks different in Outlook?

Outlook sometimes changes the formatting of HTML emails because all versions released since Outlook 2007 use Microsoft Word to render HTML/CSS. As a result your email may look slightly different on a newer version of Outlook than your initial design and formatting preview within Firefish.

Below you will see how the same email could look on 3 of the most common email providers:

Gmail

Outlook Desktop

Outlook on the Web

Typical differences that may appear include:

• No support for background images in divs and table cells

• No support for CSS float or position

• No support for text shadow

• Poor support for padding and margin

• Poor support for CSS width and height

• Problems with nested elements background colours

Whilst we will always make every effort to ensure our email templates display consistently across providers it should be noted that customisation or changes made to templates/emails may result in some of the listed inconsistencies.