Trace the password reset that never arrived

How does a companion tell a bounce from a block?

By reading both records rather than guessing from one.

Outbound messages can be searched by recipient, tag, status and date range, and a single message opens into its full detail: who it went to, what happened to it, whether it was opened or clicked, and the bounce information if there was one. The bounce list filters separately by recipient substring, tag, message id, stream or date, which is how you find the six-week-old hard bounce behind today's ticket.

The suppression list is the piece most people forget exists, and it carries the detail that settles the argument: the origin of each entry, which separates a recipient who unsubscribed from a hard bounce from something an admin added by hand. Three cases, three different replies to the customer.

The whole trace for three tickets is one instruction and comes back as a table with the evidence attached. Same investigative shape as any other data extraction job, pointed at your own mail server.

• "Trace these three addresses: outbound status, bounce record, suppression entry and its origin."
• "Which tags had the worst bounce rate last week, and what do those messages have in common?"

Get a suppressed address sending again

A companion can remove a recipient from a suppression list and reactivate a bounced address, which is how mail starts flowing again after somebody fixed a typo or sorted out a corporate filter. Both put you back in front of a mail server that previously rejected you, so both stop on an approval card.

Suppressing someone sits on the same gate. A companion can add an address to a suppression list to honour an unsubscribe that arrived by reply, and that waits for a click too, because a suppression silently drops every future send to that person.

What stands between a draft and an inbox?

Three things.

Both send tools, the direct one and the template one, are on the browser's always-interrupt list, so they stop with the recipient and the body on screen before anything leaves. Postmark rejects sends from addresses that are not verified sender signatures, and a tool lists them, so a companion checks rather than assumes. And the send carries a test mode that routes the call through Postmark's test token, which is how a template change gets rehearsed without emailing anyone.

Each send goes to the recipients you name, one call at a time, with a human clicking through. This stays a transactional tool: there is no batch endpoint and no way to fan a message out across a list.

Trace a missing email across three tools at once

The reset email that never arrived is a Postmark record, a customer in your CRM, and a ticket in your helpdesk. A companion is signed into all three, which is why the trace takes a minute rather than a meeting, and why teams run it as a recurring operations check rather than a fire drill.

Postmark's own interface keeps showing delivery trends and stream-level health at a glance on data it already holds. Open it for the shape of the week. The trace above is for the three tickets in front of you.

Frequently asked questions