Subscription Emails From Tableau Cloud Show Sent but Are Intermittently Not Received

Issue

When scheduling subscriptions on Tableau Cloud, emails are intermittently not received although Tableau Cloud shows they were successfully sent.

Environment

Tableau Cloud
Subscriptions

Resolution

Work with your internal IT staff to investigate errors, commonly due to non-existent email accounts associated with distribution email lists.

Ensure emails sent from our sending IP address 198.2.177.69 are not blocked.

Cause

Email bounce or rejection errors returned to our mail server may temporarily block emails to the recipient due to Mandrill reputation policy.

Additional Information

If the above resolution does not address the problem, reach out to Tableau Technical Support for assistance, as our mail server may have blocked the email from sending due to errors returned from the mail server.

Typical blocklist period is about 21 days. After 21 days the customer will be automatically allowlisted and will receive the subscription emails.
If a user is added to the blocklist, then this typically means that we tried sending an email, but the email was rejected or bounced. This can happen if the IP address that Mandrill used to send the email, is being blocked by the customers SMTP server.
When an email gets rejected or bounces, the recipient for that email will automatically be added to the temporary blocklist. When a user is added to the temporary blocklist, they will automatically be removed from it after some time.
The reason we must add users to a blocklist when an email is rejected or bounced, is to ensure our email sender reputation remains as high as possible. If we were to continue sending emails to recipients that are blocking our messages, then this would cause our email sender reputation to decrease and would result in our emails commonly going to Spam/Junk folders. It is important for us to follow best practices, which does include the use of a temporary blocklist, as this helps us maintain a high email sender reputation, so that users continue to get our emails in their inboxes.