A vault delivered but nothing arrived
What to check when the log says delivered and the recipient says nothing came, in the order most likely to find the cause.
1. The spam folder
By far the most common answer. An automated email from an unfamiliar sender, carrying attachments, to someone who was not expecting it, is exactly what a spam filter is built to catch. Have the recipient search their whole mailbox for "Signal Vault" rather than only looking in the inbox.
2. The address
Open the vault and read the recipient address character by character. A typo is the most common cause of a delivery that worked perfectly and reached nobody, and it is invisible until this moment because nothing is ever sent to the recipient beforehand.
Corporate addresses are the other frequent culprit: many company mail systems silently discard external mail with attachments.
3. The files came as a link, not an attachment
The delivery email carries about 9MB of attachments in total. Anything larger arrives as a download link in the same email instead. If the message arrived and the files seem to be missing, look further down it for the Open the files button. The recipient confirms the address the vault was sent to, then downloads. See attaching files to a vault.
4. Check your own audit log
Open Activity and find the delivery. The log records when the vault was triggered and the email handed over. That separates "did it send" from "did it arrive", which are different problems with different fixes.
5. Have them check filters and rules
An old rule that files automated mail into a folder nobody reads will do it. So will an address that forwards somewhere that no longer exists.
If it still cannot be found
Write to support with the vault name and roughly when it delivered. Delivery attempts are logged at our end and we can tell you what the receiving server said.
Preventing it next time
- Tell the recipient in advance that this exists and may arrive one day.
- Use a personal address rather than a work one.
- Send yourself a test delivery first, so you see exactly what arrives before you rely on it.
- Open the first two lines of your message with who you are and why they are receiving it.
Still stuck?
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