When an email does not arrive

Sometimes an email does not arrive. Not "went to spam" — genuinely refused, by the receiving mail server, and thrown away.

Before, you would not have known. The message left, the server dropped it, and the first sign was a customer asking where their invoice had got to. Now OrderDen is told, remembers the address, and stops sending to it — which means the next time you press send, you find out immediately instead of a fortnight later.

The three things that stop an address

It bounced permanently. The mailbox does not exist, or the domain refused it outright. Almost always a typo, someone who has left the company, or a domain that has lapsed. The fix is to ask the customer for a working address.

Somebody reported it as spam. They pressed the "junk" button on something you sent. This one is worth taking seriously before you clear it: complaints count against the reputation of the address everyone's mail goes out from, not just yours, so a second helping usually makes things worse. Ask them first.

It kept bouncing temporarily. A full mailbox, a mail server having an afternoon: one of those is not a dead address, and one does not stop anything — it goes on the activity trail and the next message goes out normally. Three of them is a different thing. An address that has refused three messages in a row, with nothing getting through in between, is a mailbox nobody is emptying or a server that never came back, and OrderDen stops sending to it rather than posting invoices into a void for months.

Two details of that rule are worth knowing:

• A delivery resets the count. If a message gets through, whatever happened before it is forgotten. A mailbox that filled up in March and was emptied in April does not carry March's bounces toward being switched off in June.
• Bounces older than 90 days stop counting. Two bounces last year and one today is not a pattern, and will not stop the address.

What you will see

• A notification, in the app and by email. This is one of the few things that emails you by default, because a dead address means invoices are not arriving and nobody thinks to go looking for that.
• On the client's record, the address is marked not delivering.
• On the send form, the address is still listed but cannot be picked, with the reason on hover. It stays visible on purpose — an address that vanished would look like a contact you had deleted.
• If you send anyway, from an automation or the API, the send fails with an error naming the address. It is never silently skipped.

Getting an address working again

Company Settings → Email delivery lists every address OrderDen has stopped emailing, with what happened to each. Once you have a working address — or the customer has fished you out of their junk folder — press Try again and the address is cleared.

You can also add an address to the list yourself, if there is somebody you want OrderDen never to email.

One workspace at a time

The list is yours. If an address is dead, it is dead for everyone — but another OrderDen workspace that emails the same person will find that out from its own bounce, not from yours. Nobody else's customer list is visible to you, and yours is not visible to them.

If none of this is happening

Bounce reporting depends on the person who runs your OrderDen server having wired it up (it needs Amazon SES and a notification topic). If you are self-hosting, that is docs/platform-email.md. Without it, everything above still works when you add an address by hand — there is just nothing filling the list in for you.