Email Delivery Failure Notification for 'Message not delivered' error

A large number of factors influence the successful delivery of outgoing emails (agent replies, forward emails, outbound email tickets) in Freshdesk. In rare occasions when an outgoing email is not delivered to one or more intended recipients in tickets, mail servers may provide error responses to indicate the nature of the error. These can be due to issues such as an incorrect domain, an invalid email address, or problems with mail server connectivity. 

Some of these factors indicate temporary problems with the recipients' addresses while others indicate permanent problems such as the recipient's email address itself being invalid. To maintain sender reputation, email providers like FreshMail and SendGrid (which are used by Freshdesk) add the recipient emails to a drop-list whenever the server returns an error response that’s indicative of a permanent failure. 

Note: We recommend customers to enable DKIM for support emails of your email domain as this functionality plays a crucial role in enhancing email security, establishing sender legitimacy, and ensuring better email deliverability by reducing the chances of emails being marked as spam or phishing attempts. Learn more here.

The email delivery failure and DKIM functionality is not applicable if you have configured the custom mailbox feature do

In Freshdesk, when replies or forwards don’t get delivered to recipients, email notifications are sent to the corresponding agents so that they may take corrective actions. Further, these errors will also be displayed as a part of the ticket conversation with the error 'Message not delivered', and also in the ticket list view with the tag 'Undelivered'.

By clicking on the Review option next to the indicated error in the ticket reply, you will get a detailed view of the recipient addresses that faced an email delivery failure as well as a short description of the issue. If an email address has already been added to the drop list, but you believe that it is valid, you can send a note to the administrator of your Freshdesk account, who in turn can request Freshdesk to remove the recipient email address from the drop list. 

Using automation to facilitate follow-up actions on Email Delivery Failure: (available from the Growth/Blossom plan onwards )

While email delivery failures to valid recipient addresses are rare, the occurrence of it can impact conversations you have with your customers. To make sure that your team reacts in the best way possible, you can make use of the delivery failure events in the automation to trigger follow-up actions on these tickets immediately. For example, you can change the status of the ticket to open or send an email to the group supervisor whenever this happens.

To do this, follow the steps below:

1. Log in as an Administrator of the account.

2. Navigation:

   • For Freshdesk, go to Admin > Workflows > Automations > Ticket updates tab and click New Rule.

3. Since the email delivery failure notification is triggered by the system, select System to be the event performer. 

4. Select the event, ticket properties to be matched, and actions to be performed based on your requirements, and then click on Save. Sample automation rule screenshot below for reference:

Once set up, this automation rule will be automatically triggered on tickets in the event of an email delivery failure related to agent replies or forwards, and perform actions that you have specified accordingly.

There may also be cases where you may receive non-deliverability reports from Email Service Providers (MSP) like Postmaster, Microsoft indicating emails have failed to be delivered to recipients. In such cases, we suggest you reach out to your MSP as the error reports are originated from the same. For any further help, you can reach out to our support and we can assist you.