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Pitch & Email Troubleshooting Guide
Pitch & Email Troubleshooting Guide

Explore common issues you might encounter when pitching in Muck Rack and how to solve them

Nick Lemen avatar
Written by Nick Lemen
Updated over 2 months ago

Pitch & Email Troubleshooting

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There are common reasons why pitches may experience issues:

  1. If the recipient’s email was invalid and resulted in a bounceback.

  2. If there was no email address available when your pitch was sent.

  3. If the recipient has requested not to receive pitches.

After sending your pitch, Muck Rack's team will personally research recipients categorized as an Issue. For more information on how to handle these issues, continue reading to view our Troubleshooting Guide.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: 'This recipient has requested to not receive pitches' will appear on pitches to a profile that has requested removal from the Muck Rack database, profiles that have been claimed and hidden by the journalists, and profiles that have been claimed by the journalist and the email on that profile has been hidden from view. These profiles will not be updated with an email, as Muck Rack's Editorial team will not override these user-entered settings.


Troubleshooting Guide

Issue

Solution

Your test pitch failed to send

If you sent either a Test Pitch or a test Newsletter to your email address and did not receive it, please search for the subject line of the Pitch or Newsletter in your email inbox. In addition, please click through any spam or promotions folders.

If you’re unable to locate the email, there may be a situation where the email is blocked by a setting or filter within your organization’s email provider or settings. To resolve this:

  1. Send a test email to a non-work email address that you own—for example, yourpersonalemail @gmail.com.

  2. If this test email is successfully received, use it to validate if the Pitch or Newsletter appears as expected and send it to your recipients.

  3. Reach out to your IT team and ask if any emails are being sent to your email that are being blocked.

  4. If the blocked emails include the test email, please ask your IT team to adjust the settings that will allow you to receive these tests in the future.

  5. Once your IT team has updated the settings, test emails should successfully deliver to your work email address going forward.

If you’re not receiving the test Pitch or Newsletter to any email or your IT team has not indicated any emails have been blocked, please reach out to support by choosing the chat icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Messages > Send us a message.

You run into Exchange server technical errors.

If you receive technical issues on your pitch due to the Exchange server being too busy, you can easily turn off throttling in EWS to resolve the issue by following these instructions on this website.

Your email sending limit is too low

If you are using email integration (i.e. you connected your email via the process outlined here) then you cannot request a sending limit increase.

If your email is not integrated in Muck rack, please see our Email Sending Limits article for more information on the options available to you.

You Receive the Error: “Email address connection has expired or been revoked.”

Select Disconnect Email here.

  1. Select Connect Email on that same page.

  2. If you still have issues, please let us know by selecting the chat icon in the lower right.

If your Email Integration becomes disconnected, it could be for several reasons. The below steps might help reconnect you:

  1. If you recently reset your password, re-authenticate your email in your Organization Settings with your new password.

  2. For Microsoft and Office 365 users, if your IT team has a conditional access policy, this could also cause your email to disconnect integrations. Talk with your IT team about creating a policy that is not restrictive and has long session timeouts. More information here.

You are struggling with Tracking UTMs

Apple Link Tracking Protection strips tracking-related UTMs from links shared in Mail, Messages, and Safari Private Browsing mode. Link Tracking Protection may affect your attachments.

Your Pitch says Delivered, and you received a bounceback

In most cases, a pitch that shows as sent/delivered in Muck Rack means that your message was delivered to the recipient and there were no technical issues during sending.

However, sometimes you may receive a “bounceback” email—an email sent back to your email address. This means there was an issue with the recipient's email rather than a technical issue. (The recipient may have gotten a new email address, etc.)

We also recommend reviewing our Pitch Status & Issues article for more details.

Your Pitch says it was Opened even though you received a bounceback

  • When you send a Pitch (even ones that eventually return a bounceback/undeliverable error), that Pitch still has to hit an email server somewhere during sending. That email server may automatically open emails, then log as an “Open” in Muck Rack.

For example, a journalist at a major corporation recently switched jobs. Their email address is no longer valid, but, given the security systems at large corporations, their IT team might have a firewall that opens all messages sent to their domain.

If you’d like to report a bounceback to Muck Rack so that we can help you find a new email address for a recipient, follow the instructions here.

We also recommend reviewing our Pitch Status & Issues article for more details.

Your Pitch says Undelivered.

There are a few common reasons emails can become Undeliverable:

  • Blocked email or aggressive spam filters

  • The email server is overloaded or unavailable

  • Your recipient's mailbox is full

Learn More in Help Center

We also recommend reviewing our Pitch Status & Issues article for more details.


Mail Privacy Protection

Mail Privacy Protection prevents the ability to determine whether or when an email has been opened.

Pitch recipients who have Mail Privacy Protection enabled may have their emails 'automatically opened,' which will:

  • Inflate the Opened rates in your Pitches

  • Present an Open rate corresponding with an automatic Open

  • If multiple recipients in your Pitch use Mail Privacy Protection, all of these recipients will present the same Open date and time

Pitches sent to contacts who use Mail Privacy Protection will continue to be delivered. However, we will not have the ability to accurately determine the date and time when Mail Privacy Protection contacts opened your Pitch email due to the feature.

NOTE: Clicked rates will still be reported for Pitch recipients who use most major email clients. Clicked rates will not be inflated or impacted by Mail Privacy Protection users that Pitches are sent to.


Get Help

For additional help, contact support by choosing the chat icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Messages > Send us a message.


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