An email failed to send, what do I do?

Occasionally, you may encounter a problem when sending emails from within WriteUpp, including:

A 'triggered email' - emails relating to appointment communications
An email manually generated, such as when sending an invoice to a patient
A direct message or smart form

Quite often, these issues are related to the email address that you are trying to contact, causing the message to be rejected by WriteUpp's email server. This generally happens if you've already attempted to send a message to the email address and it has failed for any reason, resulting in the email address being marked with a 'hard bounce' or as 'inactive' on our email server.

If this is the case and an email is rejected (when sending a manual email or direct message/smart form to a patient), you will see a message on screen to advise you of this. If it is an appointment communication that has failed, you will receive a notification. Examples of these are shown below...

A notification will look like this:

When trying to send an email, you'll see this:

And with a direct message or smart form, this:

Firstly, please check with the contact that the email address is correct. If it is correct, please contact the team via live chat with details of the email address in question, and we'll be able to check the reason for failure. We can reactivate a bounced email address on our email servers, but if there is an underlying cause, it might happen again.

There are many reasons why an email address might be marked with a hard bounce (which indicates a message could not be delivered), but in the example above, our server has rejected the message as the email address is incorrect - "@writeupppp.co" is not a valid email domain.

If a message has failed to send due to a spam complaint, we can request that this is removed, but only if the patient confirms that this was done in error.

If an email fails to send because of one of the above reasons, the email address on the Client Summary will automatically be opted out of appointment communications. This is because our email server has identified that the email address cannot receive emails, for whatever reason. Therefore, once the issue has been identified, you'll need to re-opt the client into email communications, so they can to receive automated messages again.

If you use the Gmail integration or an SMTP connection to send emails from WriteUpp, the delivery of these emails is via your own server and not ours, so you won't see these notifications in WriteUpp. We also won't be able to provide help and diagnostics on the reason, as we won't have received these from your email server.

Updated on: 11/02/2025

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