Email deliverability

While we optimize for deliverability, and the vast majority of Stytch emails are delivered successfully, there are still some exceptions.

Below are some common causes of email deliverability issues:

• The email address provided is inactive or outdated.
• The recipient's email inbox is full, or the email server is otherwise rejecting incoming messages.
• The user has email security software in place that blocks emails sent from email addresses or domains that aren't explicitly allowed. This is most common in enterprise settings.

Troubleshooting steps

• User hitting invalid_email errors:

  • The user's email address is improperly formatted. Ask your user to make sure that they're entering their email address correctly.
• User hitting inactive_email errors:

  • If our email provider receives a hard bounce or user-initiated spam complaint when attempting to send an email to a given email address, that email address will be marked as inactive, and future requests will result in inactive_email errors.
  • If your user has verified that their email address is correct and that they should be able to successfully receive emails, please reach out to support@stytch.com and we can reactivate the user's email address.
• Successful Stytch requests where the email doesn't appear in the user's inbox:

  • Check Stytch logs for the user via the Event logs tab in the Stytch Dashboard. If there's an issue preventing emails from being successfully triggered, you may see Error logs there. If you don't see any requests for that user (neither Success nor Error logs), there may be something preventing Stytch endpoints from being called at all for the user. In that case, we'd recommend taking a look at your own internal application logs to pinpoint the issue. If all requests appear to be successful, there may be something preventing your user's email software from displaying Stytch emails in the user's inbox.
  • Ask your user to check their spam folder. Stytch emails aren't often marked as spam, but it can happen in rare cases. If your user does find a Stytch email in their spam folder, ask them to mark it as safe or not spam to ensure that future emails reach their inbox.
  • Ask your user to add Stytch emails to their email sender allowlist. The specific process varies by email provider, but in some cases (particularly for enterprise email addresses), the user's email administrator may need to take this action for them. One example of this is Microsoft's Tenant Allowlist.

If you've completed the above troubleshooting steps and are still having trouble pinpointing the issue, we can check our email provider's logs and share the result with you (please reach out to support@stytch.com if interested). Note that once an email successfully reaches your user's email server, we no longer have visibility into why it didn't show up in their inbox.