Branching on send results

Use the action's Send status output to follow up when an email doesn't go out.

Overview

The Send transactional email action always completes — even when the email isn’t sent — so your workflow keeps going. That’s deliberate: it lets you decide what happens next instead of the workflow stopping with an error. Add an if/then branch on the action’s Send status output to catch the cases that need a person.

Before you begin

A workflow with the Send transactional email action. See Adding the Send transactional email action.

Steps

Add an if/then branch directly after the Send transactional email action.
Branch on the action’s output. In the branch filter, choose the Send transactional email action’s outputs and select Send status.
Add a branch for success. Match Sent and Queued (warm-up) — both mean the email is on its way.
Add branches for the failures you care about, such as Contact not found or Suppressed, or let everything else fall into the None met branch.
Add follow-up actions to each failure branch — create a task for the record owner, send an internal notification, or set a property.
Save and turn on the workflow.

Records that don’t get their email now land in a branch where someone can act on them.

Examples

Receipt that must reach the customer. In a deal workflow that sends a receipt to the deal’s contact, route Contact not found, Recipient invalid, and Suppressed to a task for the deal owner: “Receipt didn’t send — confirm the customer’s email address.”

Temporary problems. For Review pending, Quota exhausted, and Internal error, add a delay of an hour and re-enroll the record in a follow-up workflow, or notify an admin to check App Home. Don’t loop without a delay — repeated sends to the same address can hit the limit of 5 emails per recipient in 24 hours.

Keeping a record of what was sent. Use the Message ID output in a later action — for example, to store it on the deal — so you can look the email up in the Send log later.

Things to know

Queued (warm-up) means the email is waiting for tomorrow’s warm-up limit. It sends automatically after midnight UTC; the workflow isn’t told again when it goes out, and Message ID stays empty. The contact’s timeline shows a Sent event when it does. If it can’t be sent then — the address was suppressed in the meantime, say — the reason shows only in the Send log.
Sent means the email was accepted for delivery, not that it reached the inbox. A later bounce or spam complaint shows in the send log and on the contact’s timeline, and suppresses the address for future sends.
The workflow history shows the explanation for each outcome, such as “Not sent: no HubSpot contact has this as its primary email address.” See Send status and error codes.