Deep Dive: Best practices when you're running into trouble receiving emails from Expensify

Sheena Trepanier

Need help troubleshooting why you or your employees aren't receiving expected emails from us? Often, customers will write to us when they didn't receive one of our important email notifications, such as:

• Expensify Magic Code emails
• Validating a new Expensify account/invitation to a policy
• Secondary login validation emails 
• Integration emails (such as an auto-sync failing)
• Report action notifications (rejections, approvals, etc.)
• Any other necessary emails

Which are you experiencing?

• No error message, but the email is never received - steps below
• A "We're having trouble emailing you" banner at the top of your screen - steps below

No error message, but the email isn't received

 1. The email could just be delayed in reaching your inbox. Sometimes, the email might take a bit longer. Give it 30-60 minutes to come through.

2. Check email preference settings (this step isn’t applicable for Magic Code emails or for new Expensify users).

On the website, go to Settings > Your Account > Preferences, and scroll to Contact Preferences. Make sure boxes are checked for the email you may be missing. (Please note that unchecking either of these will not turn off Concierge notifications.)

3. Check Spam and Trash filters. Yeah, we know, it's like telling you to "make sure it's plugged in", but we all forget to check sometimes! 

4. You may be unintentionally blocking Expensify emails because we aren't whitelisted. 

How can you resolve this?

If you're using a private domain: Check with your IT person/department to ensure that expensify.com, mg.expensify.com, and amazonSES.com are whitelisted to receive our emails. These are the domains that these types of notifications come from, so you'll want to check they're not being blocked.

• If your email uses a public domain (such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) follow these steps to whitelist us:

1. Find any messages from expensify.com that ended up in your Spam folder, access them, and click Not Spam towards the top of the message
2. Add a filter that looks for the entire expensify.com domain, and actions all incoming messages as Never Send to Spam
3. Largely optional if the above two items are completed, but adding specific email addresses as contacts generally circumvent the Spam box
   (Keep in mind that two different servers send Expensify emails vs. our Concierge support communication, so even if you are receiving Concierge emails/messages, you'll still want to ensure expensify.com and mg.expensify.com are whitelisted.)
4. Your email server may be blocking emails. There are a couple of services that block our emails and flag them as spam, so you may also want to check with your IT department here too!
5. If your company uses Mimecast, this might be coming into play. Mimecast is a commonly used service that often affects the deliverability of our emails might be blocking them from hitting your inbox. Not sure if your company is using this service? Check with your IT department. If it is being used, try reaching out to us in a new email to concierge@expensify.com. We should be able to respond to this message easily, which will ensure delivery to your inbox. Mimecast will soon recognize the Expensify domain and our emails should no longer be filtered out.
6. For Outlook users specifically, please follow these troubleshooting steps: 

• Click the gear icon in Outlook and select "View all Outlook settings."
• Select "Mail" from the settings menu.
• Choose "Junk email" from the submenu.
• Click "Add" under "Safe senders and domains."
• Enter the email address that you want whitelisted.
• Choose "Save."

The "We're having trouble emailing you" banner at the top of your screen

When you click the Settings link in the banner, you are taken to your account settings, where you may see one of a few different things.

If the message mentions "temporarily suspended emails to", please follow the steps listed in the yellow box. Basically, we can't find an inbox to send our emails to. This could be caused by a misspelled email address when you created your account, a distribution list email (with no actual inbox linked, and acting as an "alias" email), or if you have had an auto-responder responding to our emails for some time. Once you can confirm that the email address is indeed linked to an active inbox, then you can click where it states "here" and your email should be unblocked shortly.
You may also get a gray box with an SMTP error that looks something like this:

These look a bit cryptic, yes, but hang in there! 

These error messages are the raw message text received from your email provider's server to Amazon. They can range in text, but the best bet is to follow the link (by copying and pasting) that is provided in the text for the next steps. 

• If the message in the gray box includes "mimecast.com" (like the screenshot above), you will want to speak to your IT person/team because our emails are being blocked by the server.
• If the message in the gray box mentions "blacklist at org/.com/.net, etc" or looks like the screenshot below, then it means your IT team has configured your email to use a third-party email reputation/blacklisting service. All of our emails are SPF and DKIM-signed, which means they are cryptographically signed as being from us and are not spam. You'll likely want to talk to your IT team about this. The issue here is that we're sending mail from a cloud-based service. This means that the IP of the sender services multiple vendors in addition to Expensify. If one of those vendors gets marked as spam, you're blocking all messages coming from that IP -- even if the messages are from completely different vendors (including us). Instead, the server should be flagging spam via DKIM and SPF (rather than the IP address of the sender alone), as our messages are properly signed and encrypted to prevent spoofing.