Your email API returned 200. Here's why the email still never arrived
A user signs up. Your code calls the email API. You get 200 OK and an id back. The user says the verification email never came. You check the logs: success. You check your code: it's fine. You send yourself a test: it arrives. Your user still has nothing. This is one of the most common email bugs, and it hides in the gap between three different things that all get called "sent": Accepted. The…
When a user signs up and your code calls the email API, you typically receive a 200 OK response along with an email ID. However, this 200 status code only indicates that your request was accepted by the API and does not guarantee that the email will actually reach the user's inbox. Users often report that their verification emails never arrive, even though the API logs indicate success and a test sent from your own address works fine.
This common email bug lies in the gap between the three distinct events that are all called "sent": Accepted, Delivered, and Inboxed.
The email API has accepted your request, which is reflected by the 200 status code, but the email may not have been delivered to the recipient's mail server yet. Instead, it enters a queue or is handed over to the mail infrastructure, waiting for a response from the recipient's server. Once the recipient's server accepts the message, it goes into the inbox, but this step is not visible to you or your API provider.
To debug this issue, start by finding out what actually happened to the email. Check the email object's last_event field, which provides the current status of the message. The statuses can range from queued or sending, still in the pipeline, to bounced, delivered, complained about as spam, suppressed (never sent), or failed. Each status points to a different problem, and debugging paths vary accordingly.
For instance, if the status is "bounced," it means the receiving server rejected the email. In this case, you would need to examine the bounce code to determine the exact reason. Alternatively, if the status is "complained," the recipient marked the email as spam, indicating that the content might be unwanted.
In summary, the 200 status code is just the first step in the email delivery process. To ensure your emails reach the user's inbox, you must investigate the subsequent statuses and understand why the email never made it to the inbox in the first place.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
