Question

Someone invited me to be a developer on his app. I did not get the email invite?

I have had others invite me and it works (and works well!)

We got around the problem by having an invite sent to another account. That works for now, but I really need the invite to be sent to the correct account.

Gary

Answer 1

The question is borderline off-topic in that it’s not usually a programming question, but it comes up so often, from programmers and the customers we support, that I wanted to put an answer here in the hopes that it would be helpful.

I see that it was in your spam folder, which is one of the more common causes of “lost” emails.

In short, when an email is sent from one server, it goes through several other servers and routers on the way to the final user’s PC.

Any one of the following conditions could cause a sent email to not reach a recipient:

1. Blocked Outbound Mail – The sender’s company/business/ISP has email scanning software that scans outbound email, and blocks suspicious outbound emails.
   • Our workplace has this to limit sensitive data being sent out accidentally, to block outbound infected emails sent from infected PCs.
2. Relay Server Permissions/Configuration – Your code is sending through a relay server that has rules blocking unauthorized use of email relay functionality.
   • In most shops with good security consciousness, email servers are configured to disallow email relay except for known IP addresses and/or known, explicitly authorized users.
3. External party blocks the email – The sender’s company has been blacklisted.
4. Blocked Inbound Mail – The receivers company has email scanning software that scans incoming email (similar to #1) to block malicious/non-work related/bad emails from reaching the recipient’s inbox.
5. Receiver’s Spam Filtering – The receiver’s email inbox has spam mail filtering, which may automatically move the email to a spam folder, delete them, or other action depending on how you have it configured.
6. Receiver’s Inbound Mail Rules – Similar to the above. The recipient may have rules defined that block, delete, or move emails.
   • Outlook allows this, as do other email clients. Emails can match the patterns set for existing rules and result in false positives that trigger the rule execution.
7. Human error – the sender sent the email to the wrong email address.
8. Human error – the recipient accidentally deleted the email and just didn’t see it. (You’d be surprised how often I’ve seen this.)
9. Bad programming – there was an error sending the email, but the exception handling ignores the error, so nobody ever knows any better.

Only #9 is actually a programming issue, and it’s also (in my experience) the least common. Odds are that the problem has nothing to do with code that you’d be writing.

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones I’ve seen the most frequently. I’ll add as I think of others.