Common Issues
Solutions to frequently encountered problems when using Distill.
Most issues with Distill fall into a handful of categories: email delivery, AI processing, subscriber imports, and configuration. This article covers the most frequently encountered problems and their solutions.
My emails are going to spam
Recipients reporting that your newsletters are landing in spam is usually caused by one or more of the following:
Domain not verified or incorrectly configured. If your DKIM or SPF records are missing, invalid, or not yet propagated, receiving servers will treat your email as unauthenticated and route it to spam. Go to Settings > Sending Domain and confirm both DKIM and SPF show as Verified. If either shows Pending or Failed, see Domain Setup.
Engagement-based filtering. If a large portion of your list hasn't opened your last several emails, email providers can interpret this as spam. Remove inactive subscribers and focus your list on engaged readers.
Content triggers. Subject lines with excessive capitalization, certain promotional keywords, or misleading claims can increase spam scores. Revise your subject line to be direct and honest.
For Gmail users: ask your subscribers to move your email from spam to their inbox and click "Not spam." This teaches Gmail's filters that your email is wanted and improves deliverability to that subscriber going forward.
AI summary is not generating
When you add a link to an issue and the AI summary fails or stalls, the most common causes are:
The page is behind a paywall. Distill uses Firecrawl to scrape the article content before passing it to Gemini for summarization. If the content is paywalled, Firecrawl retrieves only a preview or a sign-in prompt, and the resulting summary will be empty or incorrect. Use links to publicly accessible content.
The URL is inaccessible. Firewalls, bot-detection systems, or geolocation restrictions can prevent Firecrawl from loading certain pages. Try opening the URL in an incognito browser window from a different network to check if it is publicly accessible.
Firecrawl timeout. Very slow-loading pages or unusually large articles can cause the scraping step to time out. If this happens, try a different URL for the same article (for example, the AMP version or a syndicated copy).
Temporary processing error. Occasionally, the AI pipeline returns a transient error. Remove the link and re-add it to trigger a fresh processing attempt.
If a link consistently fails to process, use the manual summary field — you can type or paste your own summary instead of relying on AI generation.
Subscribers are not receiving confirmation emails
When a subscriber signs up but does not receive their confirmation email:
Check the spam folder first. Confirmation emails from new senders are sometimes filtered to spam, especially before your domain has built up a strong reputation. Ask the subscriber to check their spam or junk folder.
DNS propagation delay. If you recently verified a new sending domain, it can take up to 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate globally. During that window, some email providers may still treat your domain as unverified.
Email address typo. Confirm the subscriber entered their address correctly. The confirmation email is sent immediately after sign-up — if it never arrived, the address may have been entered incorrectly.
Check your sending domain status. If your sending domain has lost its verified status (due to DNS changes at your provider), confirmation emails will fail silently. Go to Settings > Sending Domain and re-verify if needed.
Distill cannot override spam filtering decisions made by your subscribers' email providers. If multiple subscribers report the same issue, focus on improving overall deliverability following the Deliverability Best Practices guide.
CSV import failed
When importing subscribers from a CSV file fails:
Check the file format. The CSV must have at least two columns: email and name. The header row is required. Column names are case-insensitive (Email, email, EMAIL are all accepted). If either required column is missing, the import will fail.
Check encoding. The CSV file must be UTF-8 encoded. If your spreadsheet software exports in a different encoding (for example, Windows-1252 from older Excel versions), special characters in subscriber names may cause parse errors. Open the file in a text editor and re-save it as UTF-8, or use "Save As" in Excel and choose UTF-8 CSV.
Remove duplicate email addresses. If the file contains the same email address on multiple rows, Distill imports only the first occurrence. Duplicate email addresses do not cause the import to fail — they are silently deduplicated.
File size. Very large CSV files (tens of thousands of rows) may take longer to process. The import runs asynchronously — refresh the subscriber list page after a few minutes to see the results.
After a CSV import completes, Distill shows a summary: how many records were imported, how many were skipped as duplicates, and how many were rejected due to invalid email format.
Scheduled send did not go out
If a scheduled newsletter issue did not send at the expected time:
Timezone mismatch. The schedule time is interpreted in the timezone configured for your workspace. If you set a time thinking of a different timezone, the issue may have sent at an unexpected time (or may still be scheduled for the future). Check Settings > General for your workspace timezone and compare it against the scheduled time.
Missing or unverified sending domain. Distill will not send an issue if the workspace's sending domain is not verified at send time. If your domain verification expired or was invalidated, the scheduled send is blocked. Distill will notify you by email if this occurs. Re-verify your domain and manually trigger the send from the issue detail page.
Plan sending limit reached. If your account has exhausted its monthly sending volume, scheduled sends are held until the next billing period or until you upgrade your plan.
If a scheduled send was blocked for any reason, it does not retry automatically. After resolving the underlying issue, go to the issue detail page and click Send now to send it manually.
I cannot verify my sending domain
If your domain verification keeps failing:
DNS propagation delay. After adding DNS records, changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate worldwide, though most providers update within 15-30 minutes. If you just added the records, wait and try the verification check again.
Incorrect record format. The most common mistake is including the full domain in the host field when the DNS provider automatically appends the domain. For example, if your provider expects mail._domainkey.newsletters (not mail._domainkey.newsletters.yourdomain.com), entering the full version creates a malformed record. Check your DNS provider's documentation for whether they append the domain automatically.
Multiple SPF records conflict. You can only have one SPF TXT record per hostname. If an SPF record already exists on your sending domain, edit it to add include:amazonses.com rather than creating a second SPF record. Two SPF records on the same hostname will cause verification failure and email delivery issues.
See Domain Setup for a full troubleshooting checklist.
My bounce rate is too high
A high bounce rate (typically above 2-3%) indicates list hygiene problems:
Remove hard bounces immediately. Distill automatically suppresses hard-bounced addresses (permanent delivery failures such as addresses that don't exist). These are removed from your active list. Check the bounce list in your subscriber management to confirm suppression is working.
Clean your list before your next send. If you imported a list that hasn't been emailed in months or years, many addresses may have become invalid. Consider running the list through an email verification service before importing it into Distill.
Run a re-engagement campaign. Before removing inactive subscribers wholesale, send one final email asking if they want to stay on your list. Those who do not respond within a week can be removed without affecting your relationship with active readers.
If your bounce rate causes sending to be paused, contact support at support@distill.ink — the team can review your account and help you clean your list before reactivating.