Why are my Journey emails marked as sent or delivered, but not appearing in the recipient's inbox?

If your Journey emails are reported as 'sent' or 'delivered' but recipients say they never saw them, work through the following:

1. Check spam/junk folders: ask the recipient to check Spam, Junk, Promotions and any other filtered folders. Mail landing there confirms delivery but points at sender reputation or content filtering.

2. Verify recipient status: in Audience → User Explorer, confirm the address is registered, is not unsubscribed or suppressed after a bounce, and passes the journey's Reachability check if you use one.

3. Send a test email: go to Campaigns → One-time messages, click Send message > Email and send a simple message to the affected address.

   • If the test email is received, the problem is specific to the Journey email's content or configuration.
   • If it is not received, you are looking at a broader delivery problem with that recipient or domain.

4. Analyse 'open' events: an 'open' recorded for a message the recipient claims not to have received usually means the mail was delivered but scanned or filtered by the recipient's security gateway before reaching the inbox — the tracking pixel loads during that processing.

5. Test content variations: resend with different subject lines, wording and links to identify what triggers the recipient's filters.

6. Test different domains: send to addresses on Gmail, Outlook and another corporate domain to see whether the problem is provider-specific.

7. Involve the recipient's email administrator: if mail is consistently accepted (especially when opens are recorded) but never reaches the inbox for one domain, that domain's server configuration or filtering rules are responsible. The recipient may need their administrator to inspect server logs and allowlist your sending domain.

If several unrelated domains are affected, review your email deliverability setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC and custom tracking domain) before troubleshooting individual recipients.