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Forum Discussion
Emails containing dropbox links not being received
I send emails to clients with dropbox links pasted into the message. It's suddenly become a problem with clients not receiving the mail.
Sharing the link seems to work, but emails I generate are only getting through 50% of the time.
Help! This is vital to my business.
Thanks
- Mark
Super User II
Try sending via your own email client.
If that doesn't work you need to get them to contact there Email hosts and see whats blocking it.
Thanks. I am sending from my own email client. It's never been a problem till last week or so, for several different recipients.
- Mark
If its via your own email client its an issue with EITHER your outgoing email provider or, more likely, the recipients emails provider blocking things.
Hi,
I am facing similar issues. Emails with the links to shared dropbox folders are not getting sent - why is this, and how do I correct the problem? I am using a gmail account to send the shared folder links.
I'm sharing a folder with someone, but they are not getting the emails generated from dropbox. It may be because their firewall is preventing the email. I can send them a link, but they can't edit the folder. Is there a way to get this person editing access without going through the "Sharing/email" procedure which he is obviously not getting? They have checked their junk mail, and no luck.
My client is also experiencing this problem. They're sending within their own organization, posting links as agenda items in Outlook calendar items. Meetings with certain Dropbox links just never show up. If I change the link using something like tinyurl.com, the meetings show up. This is Office365 with no rules specific to Dropbox that could be blocking it; the only thing that makes sense is that sometimes the links look virusy and some behind-the-scenes rule (outside of my access as Office365 administrator) is blocking it.
This really isn't something that can be fixed "on my end" -- can DropBox see whether they can make their links look less virusy maybe?
- Rich
Once you've invited them to the folder, they should be able to accept it from the Sharing page.
- This is also happening with me. I do not get any emails with a Dropbox link. I’ve tried everything. Even if I send the Dropbox link myself, and they try to reply to that email, without links even in the reply, I will still not get their emails.
Please let me know if this is a known issue.- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hey Cheyenne_integrityav, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.
Can you walk us through the exact steps you're taking to do this and also let us know what plan you're on at the moment?
When you say you're not getting their emails, could you elaborate a tad on that as well?
I really can't easily provide that unfortunately, but I can walk you through the process.
- You "share" a document to create a link. The link ends up having a lot of seemingly random alphanumeric characters in it, as always.
- You then paste that link into an e-mail or a calendar invite and send it.
- The e-mail or calendar invite goes nowhere -- it seems to send, but is never received by the recipient.
- THEN, you run that same link through something like tinyurl.com (which changes the link to something else).
- You paste the link from tinyurl.com into an e-mail or a calendar invite and send it.
- The recipient gets the email.
So basically, some of the links being generated by DropBox seem to be getting flagged as potentially harmful links based on the characters within the link. I've verified that it isn't happening within any filters in my client's Office365 mail system (or at least, I can't find any filter that might be doing that, and the DropBox-related messages do not show up on any alerts in the O365 admin center), and in some cases the recipient is within the organization (so it's mailing from and to the same mail server, and yet is still getting blocked by something in the middle somewhere).
I don't have an example of the affected links because my client wasn't able to e-mail them to me, as described above.
Some links generated by DropBox work, but somewhere between a third and half of the links they generate do not (to the point where they just always include using tinyurl.com as an extra step in the process of sharing links).
