A large number of factors influence the successful delivery of emails. In a rare occasion that an email does not get delivered to one or more of the intended recipients, 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 server connectivity.
Some of these factors indicate temporary problems with the recipient address while others are indicative of permanent problems such as the address itself being invalid. To maintain sender reputation, email providers like SendGrid (which is used by Freshdesk) add emails to a drop-list whenever the server returns an error response that’s indicative of a permanent failure.
In Freshdesk, when replies or forwards don’t get delivered to recipients, 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, and also in the ticket activities view.
By clicking on the error link, you will get a detailed view of the recipient addresses that faced a delivery issue as well as a short description. If you have the phone channel enabled in your account, you can click on the phone icon to call the number that is associated with the recipient.
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 admin of your Freshdesk account, who in turn can request Freshdesk to remove the email address from the drop list.
Using automation rules to facilitate follow-up actions: (available on Blossom, Garden, Estate and Forest plans)
While email delivery failures to a 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 rules 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:
Go to Admin > Automations > Ticket updates tab and click on New Rule.
Since the mail delivery failure notification is triggered by the system, select System to be the event performer.
Select the event, ticket properties to be matched, actions to be performed, and then click on Save.
Once set up, this rule will be automatically triggered in the event of a delivery failure related to agent replies or forwards, and perform actions that you have specified.
Note: The above functionality is not applicable if you have configured the custom mailbox functionality.