Failure Alerts

SendGrail can notify you immediately when an email fails to send, allowing you to respond to delivery issues before they affect your users.

How It Works

When an email delivery attempt fails, SendGrail sends a notification email to the configured alert recipient with details about the failure.

Notification Contents

Each failure alert includes:

Field	Description
Error Message	The specific error returned by the SMTP server or transport layer
Recipient	The intended recipient of the failed email
Subject	The subject line of the failed email
Timestamp	When the failure occurred

Configuration

Failure alerts are managed through the following settings:

Setting	Default	Description
notify_on_failure	true	Enable or disable failure notifications
notification_email	Site admin email	The email address that receives failure alerts

TIP

Consider using a shared team inbox or an external monitoring address for failure alerts. This ensures delivery issues are noticed even if the primary admin is unavailable.

Loop Prevention

Failure alerts are designed with safeguards to prevent notification loops:

• Notification failures are not reported -- If the failure alert email itself fails to send, no further notification is generated. This prevents an infinite chain of failure alerts.

• WordPress default mail transport -- Failure alerts are sent using the WordPress default mail function with SendGrail hooks temporarily removed. This avoids routing the notification through the same SMTP connection that may be experiencing problems, and prevents the notification from being logged, tracked, or processed by SendGrail.

WARNING

Because failure alerts bypass SendGrail entirely, they rely on whatever mail transport WordPress uses natively (typically PHP mail() or a configured fallback). Ensure your server's default mail function is operational if you depend on failure alerts.

Best Practices

• Keep failure alerts enabled (the default) unless you have an alternative monitoring solution in place.
• Set the notification_email to an address hosted on a different provider than your SMTP connections. If your SMTP provider goes down, alerts sent through the same provider would also fail.
• Review failure alerts promptly. Repeated failures for the same connection often indicate expired credentials, blocked accounts, or provider outages.