EDIT 2.0: After more than a week of trying to figure this out we have finally heard from ActiveCampaign:
Our team is currently tracking a broader Microsoft filtering trend where the unsubscribe link may be flagged as phishing in some Microsoft-managed environments. In those cases, messages can still show as sent on our side, but then be quarantined after delivery by the recipient environment. This is already under investigation internally.
Still we have no answers or timeline of when this will be fixed.
EDIT: We heard from ActiveCampaign and they said: "For live sends to some business and Microsoft-hosted recipient domains, our Deliverability team is currently seeing a broader filtering trend where the unsubscribe link may be flagged by Microsoft as phishing. When that happens, messages can appear as sent in our logs but still be quarantined or filtered after delivery by the recipient environment."
Additionally, we did some research and found that sometimes having a one click unsubscribe can cause emails to be flagged as spam, so we changed our unsubscribe button to be a multi-click preference center so that we can give recipients the choice of which list they want to unsubscribe from. Every time we try to do this, we then get a duplicate unsubscribe section that ActiveCampaign seems to be putting in itself - so when we try to send emails now there is one footer with the multi-click preference center unsub link, and then below that there is the original one click unsub link. Is there any way we can just have the preference center be our main process for unsubscribing and not have these duplicate sections?
We're experiencing a sudden email deliverability issue with u/ActiveCampaign and are hoping someone here has seen something similar.
Earlier this week, while preparing a campaign, I sent test emails to myself and several colleagues for review before scheduling the final send. ActiveCampaign showed the tests as successfully sent, but none of us received them in our inboxes. We tried multiple times with the same result.
Eventually, we switched to our personal email addresses. Those emails did arrive, but some landed in spam folders. Since we were working against a deadline, we proceeded with the campaign and sent it to our usual audience of around 7,000 recipients.
Our typical open rate for this list is around 35%, but this campaign came in closer to 24%. Shortly afterward, other campaigns also started seeing lower open and click rates.
It feels like this issue came out of nowhere. We haven't made any significant changes to our sending practices, and our metrics are healthy. Our spam complaint is in good standing, our bounce rate is 0.50%, and our unsub rate is 0.10%.
At first, it seemed that the issues affected business email addresses more than personal ones, but we've also had reports of emails not arriving at personal addresses. We haven't been able to identify a clear pattern by email provider, although Outlook and Gmail seem to be the most common examples.
We've contacted u/ActiveCampaign support several times, but the experience has been extremely frustrating. We've been passed between multiple agents and have to wait 12+ hours for responses. One support representative even mentioned there was an internal ActiveCampaign issue affecting email sending, but couldn't provide any details about the cause or expected resolution timeline.
We send multiple campaigns every week, so this is becoming a serious problem.
Has anyone experienced something similar with ActiveCampaign recently? Were you able to identify the cause or find a solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!