Where do undeliverable emails go?

We have SMTP emailing set up and working, however we never get any bouncebacks from email addresses that are wrong.

I have just created a test client with an email address I know bounces back, sent them an invoice, but have no undeliverable message in my inbox.

Obviously it’s really useful for us to know if our emailed invoices aren’t getting through. Is this a quirk in our set up or do the bounces go somewhere else?

Hi @AsherJac

If you’re using your own SMTP, it would normally be the email address it was sent from. From experience, they can take a while to bounce back in some cases.

Is your SMTP working 100%? If not, the fallback option is our own SMTP server and the noreply email address, in which case they don’t go anywhere.

As far as I’m aware it’s working 100%.

How should I check to make sure?

If you go to Account Settings >> All Settings >> Sent Email Log, pick a recent email and view it. At the top of the email, it will show you what SMTP server it used. For example:

I don’t seem to have ‘Sent Email Log’ in ‘All Settings’.

It should be there:

It is a Power User feature, but the option should still be visible.

If you could confirm the last 3 digits of your account number, I’ll take a look for you if you like?

We’ve got a power user subscription but I don’t have the audit heading at all.

Account number ends 699.

Hi @AsherJac

I do apologise, that option is only visible to the main administrator on the account, which could be why you can’t see it.

I’ve checked your SMTP details, and they all seem OK. Emails are being sent from your custom SMTP server, so any undelivered emails should bounce back to the address you’re using on the account

[Edit]
If you haven’t received any bounced emails, it may be worth checking generic email inboxes - postmaster@ admin@ etc. It depends on how the SMTP server is configured.

Also there’s a difference between bounces and rejections. If QuickFile offers a message to your SMTP server, the server accepts the message from QuickFile but is subsequently unable to deliver it to its destination, then yes, your server will generate a bounce message back to the sender address.

But if your SMTP server rejects the message from QuickFile in the first place then that’s a different matter, and it would then be up to QuickFile itself to handle the failure notification (in this situation QuickFile is acting in the role of the client, like your normal desktop email program, and we’re talking about the kind of error that would cause a desktop client to pop up an error message box).

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