Requesting assistance from Support to investigate an email problem
| Situation | Assistance is required from support to investigate an email problem. |
|---|---|
| Solution | Provide Permalink, Full Internet Headers, and Email body. |
Information to help support solve the issue
Reporting an email problem to Proofpoint Essentials Support requires information to assist us in investigating and narrowing down the issue.
If this problem is regarding a misclassification, we strongly recommend that you consult our knowledgebase article How to tune Proofpoint Essentials spam detection performance.
Unless there's a real classification bug with the Proofpoint Essentials engine, which is rare, our advice would be based on the information in the knowledgebase article as this is the main tool we use. However, we can make suggestions and investigate where something might clearly be wrong. If you get stuck on a problem we are happy to help.
There are three things we need to help us investigate or give advice on an email problem:
Permalink
Among other things, this is a very convenient reference that we can use to immediately find the email you're talking about. You can find it for any email in the Email Logs section of the Proofpoint Essentials User Interface. Just find the message in the logs, then click under 'Actions' to bring up the Detailed Email Log Entry page. If the email in question is not in Email Logs, it didn't pass through Proofpoint Essentials (but maybe you have a bounce problem?).
Full internet headers
Headers of the email contain some other useful information regarding where the email came from, how it was constructed, the history of the email's travel between mail servers, etc. Often this will contain the answer we seek. Simply forwarding an email, either inline or as an attachment, in most cases does NOT include this header information; the procedure for obtaining the headers will differ from email client to email client, so please refer to the help pages for that email client.
Email body
The email body might contain some final clues that would help us to determine the most appropriate way to deal with the problem, and help us to understand what it is you expect from Proofpoint Essentials regarding this email. Of course, some emails are private and you may prefer not to share the content. This might hinder us only depending on the kind of advice you are looking for.
Most Effective Support Queries
The most effective queries to support will contain:
- A statement providing the Permalink and a description of the problem.
- What you've tried so far and why it didn't work.
- The problem email's full internet headers, with the body of the email in question attached.
If this is about a series of emails:
- Please provide as many relevant Permalinks as you think appropriate.
- One good example of the headers and email body.
- A note describing the problem and the pattern that links the series of emails.
Every situation is different, so please use your best judgment and try thinking from the point of view of someone trying to assist with a problem. We want to help you as quickly as possible and to avoid the time-consuming back-and-forth of asking for more information.