Mautic says contact has read the email but contact never received!

Your software
My Mautic version is: v4.4.10
My PHP version is: 8
My Database type and version is: mysql

Your problem
My problem is:
hi, i’m new here but i’m using mautic self hosted for a couple of years now
i have discovered a big big problem that impact my business
I mostly send segment emails to a list of contacts, some receive it, some don’t.
The tragic thing is that, I checked today, Mautic tells me that a contact received the email and read it, I checked directly with the contact and he says he never received it (but he received the previous ones)
My mautic is installed on sitegorund but sending is done with AWS SES
the other day I hired a technician on AWS marketplace to check my configuration and possibly activate the service with dedicated IP (it is now active but not used because I am under the threshold of 2000 contacts)
I absolutely have to solve it and be sure that the emails arrive and are actually read.
What can I do?
I wouldn’t want to switch to some software like mailchimp
Mautic Version v4.4.10
I also made all sort of test by sending campaign, segment mail, direct mail to my personal email (gmail)
analized the email headers… all it’s ok
Thank you

Read reports are super unreliable as many email servers and anti spam services open emails to check for issues, spam etc, and so trigger a read report.

There is no 100% reliable way to confirm someone has indeed read your email, unless actually ask them. Even link clicks are unreliable as some email services will even click links and visit the webpage to check for potential issues.

One technique is to ask the recipient to physically reply to your email to let you know they got it.

thanks for the info
i asked to a contact by he can’t find the email in his inbox
(and the email is marked read)

Hello,

I had this issue before with Mautic v4.x.x not sure what number it was earlier in the year. I’m learning that 3rd party sites connected to Mautic for doing email isn’t 100 percent reliable at all it’s like 50/50 it does or doesn’t and it’s random.

I’ve learned if you have shared hosting connected to 3rd party email platforms, it also creates problems. I spent well over a hundred hours this year alone dealing with emails not sending, or they send but show read and even unsubscribed when the email recipient wasn’t even receiving them to start with. What I had to do deal with a few minor adjustments to my PHP.ini with SMTP / IMAP and having DNS records worked on dealing with Email itself.

I had to redo the smtp/imap configuration settings in Mautic. Using your own domain and email system on your hosting works better, only if you have VPS hosting or Dedicated or Semi-Dedicated server hosting. I have a Dedicated Server and I simply deleted the email account I had setup in Mautics configuration on the email server, re-created a the same one again, deleted it also from Mautic and connected them again and did a test and things connected. From there I did a group test email of 10 emails being sent to a variety of made-up emails I made on my hosting and all of them came through, I opened them, even clicked on links and the report came back showing all that perfectly. Including a gmail, and yahoo email.

Having full control of your domain and email itself makes all the difference because you have the ability to change and edit anything vs AWS, or Gmail. My Dedicated Server also has a 50,000k-a-day email limit so that helps show you the difference on using 3rd party vs your own.

SPF records are very important along with DMARC, Domainkey, and MX records are all important to having your email work properly with any application like Mautic. The other thing is to make sure you have the Cron setup right and the timing working or that can be an issue.

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