Investigating Why a Recipient Received the Same Outbound Communication More Than Once

When you're doing a send out in Agillic, you may come across recipients that report receiving the same outbound communication such as an email or an SMS more than once. 

The common reasons for a recipient to receive the same Outbound communication more than once are:

• Your Flow is Set Up to Execute on Staging and Production
• The Person Data Field MOBILE or EMAIL is Not Unique
• Your Recipient Exists With Several Versions of the Same Email Address
• The Email is Being Forwarded
• Max Repetitions Per Recipient is Not Set to 1 and the Flow Executes Several Times

Your Flow is Set Up to Execute on Staging and Production

If your Flow doesn't have a check in the checkbox 'Only execute on Production', your Flow will both execute on Staging and Production with a scheduled execution.

This means that if any recipients are included in your Target Group on Staging at the time of the execution, the Flow will execute for those recipients as well. If you, for example, have a recipient with your own email address on both Staging and Production, this could result in you receiving two communications.

The Person Data Field MOBILE or EMAIL is Not Unique

In Agillic, you can set your Person Data to be unique. This means that the Person Data will have to be unique across all your recipients to ensure that you don't have any duplicates. Depending on your setup, for some use cases, you'll use member number, card number, or similar to identify recipients. 

To avoid sending the same outbound communication to the same recipient more than once, it's always recommended to set your MOBILE and EMAIL Person Data to unique.

Learn more about how to set a Unique Person Data here.

Your Recipient Exists With Several Versions of the Same Email Address

If you set the Person Data EMAIL to unique, you protect yourself from most situations where a recipient is duplicated. However, some email providers still consider several versions of the same email address to count as one. 

An example of this is Gmail email addresses. Any email address containing a '.' or a '+' is considered the same as an email without these characters. For example, agillic.support@gmail.com is the same as agillicsupport@gmail.com or agillic+support@gmail.com. These emails could be counted as three different recipients so the same recipient would receive an email three times. 

The best way to identify recipients with several versions of the same email address is to create a Target Group with a wildcard (*) character and a like condition.

For example, All - Person Data - EMAIL - Like - agillic*@gmail.com - Condition met.

A Target Group containing email addresses that Gmail considers the same email address

The Email is Being Forwarded

Recipients may report that they've received an email even though they're not present in your Agillic database. Investigating this can be very tricky, but is easily done if your recipient can forward the email to you. Setting up an email address forward is done through the email client, and therefore this forward is also removed through the email client. 

To identify if an email has been forwarded or not, you must have access to the original email and inspect the header that will contain information on which original email address forwarded the email to your recipient.

Max Repetitions Per Recipient is Not Set to 1 and the Flow Executes Several Times

When you're setting up a Flow in Agillic, you can prevent your recipients from entering the Flow multiple times by activating 'Max repetitions per recipient' in your Flow settings. 

To identify if a recipient has received an email twice, you can investigate your recipient. With this method, you can see how many emails the recipient received. If the same email executes twice to a recipient, it will be present in the Investigator.