Viewing and Resending Failed Emails

Most of the email Aeon sends goes out on its own. When a request is routed, a user is cleared, or you send a message from a request or user record, Aeon queues the email and a background process delivers it. You normally never see this happen.

A failed email is one Aeon tried to send but couldn't — usually because of a bad recipient address, but the cause can be anything the mail server rejected. Failed emails don't disappear: they collect in the Failed Emails queue with the error reason attached, waiting for a staff member to look at them. This page is about that follow-up — reading what went wrong, correcting the email if needed, and sending it again.

When you'll use this

• A notification didn't reach a researcher and you need to find out why and get it delivered.
• A failed email has a typo in the address (or the address has since changed) — fix the recipient and resend.
• A batch of emails failed (for example, a mail-server outage) and you want to resend them all at once now that the problem is fixed.
• An email failed but no longer needs to go out — cancel it so it stops sitting in the queue.

Failed vs. Pending

The Outgoing Emails area has two queues: Pending Emails (waiting to be sent) and Failed Emails (delivery already attempted and rejected). Resending and editing apply to the Failed queue — pending emails are view-only because they haven't been tried yet. Cancelling works in both. See The Outgoing Emails Queue: Pending and Failed for the queue itself; this page focuses on what you do with a failure.

Opening the Failed Emails queue

Most of the time you find out an email failed without going looking for it. Whenever any email fails, a red failed-email indicator — a small mail-warning icon with a count — appears in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. It only shows when there's at least one failure, so seeing it is your cue that something needs attention. Click it to jump straight to the Failed Emails queue.

You can also open the queue directly: click the More options menu (the ⋮ button at the top right), and under Manage choose Failed Emails. (Pending Emails sits right beside it.) Both entries appear only if your role can view email.

Either way lands you on the same page:

1. The page splits into a list of failed emails on the left and a detail pane on the right.
2. The dropdown at the top of the list reads Failed Emails with the count in red — for example, Failed Emails (3). You can switch to Pending Emails from the same dropdown.
3. Each card in the list shows the date, the email type (such as Transaction or User), the staff member tied to it, the To address, the subject, and — in red — a short snippet of the failure reason.
4. Click a card to load the full email in the detail pane on the right.

Reviewing a failed email

With an email selected, the detail pane shows the message as it was queued:

• To, From, Subject, and the Email body.
• CC and BCC, hidden by default — click Show CC, BCC to reveal them (and Hide CC, BCC to collapse them again). They expand automatically if the email already has a CC or BCC value.
• An Error Note at the bottom, in red, with the reason the send failed. This is the first thing to read — it usually tells you whether the problem is the address, the content, or the mail server.

From is read-only

The From address is shown for reference but can't be edited here. Everything else — To, CC, BCC, Subject, and the Email body — is editable on a failed email.

Resending a single email

For example, suppose the notification for request #12345 failed because the address was mistyped as jdoe@univ.ed:

1. Open Failed Emails and click the failed email in the list.
2. Read the Error Note to confirm what went wrong.
3. Correct whatever's needed — here, fix To to jdoe@univ.edu. You can also adjust CC, BCC, Subject, or the Email body.
4. If you made a change you didn't mean to, click Discard Changes to snap every field back to what was originally queued. (This button only appears once you've edited something.)
5. Click Resend.

Aeon confirms with "Email queued for resend." The email moves out of the Failed queue and back into Pending, where the background process will try to deliver it again. Resending also clears the old error note.

You can resend without changing anything

If the failure was temporary — a mail-server hiccup, say — you don't have to edit anything. Just open the email and click Resend as-is. Only the fields you actually change are sent back to Aeon; an untouched email is requeued exactly as it was.

A recipient is required

You can't resend an email with an empty To field — Aeon rejects it with "Recipient address is required." Make sure there's a valid recipient before resending.

Resending or cancelling several emails at once

When many emails fail together — most often after a mail-server outage — you can act on them as a group instead of one by one.

1. In the Failed Emails list, check the box on each email you want to act on. To grab everything at once, use the select-all checkbox in the bar above the list (it shows a dash when only some are selected).
2. A bar appears along the bottom of the screen showing how many you've selected — for example, 5 selected.
3. Choose an action:
   • Resend — requeues every selected failed email for delivery and clears their error notes.
   • Cancel — removes the selected emails from the queue without sending them.
4. Aeon reports the outcome, for example "Resent 5 emails" — or "Resent 4 emails, 1 failed" if one couldn't be processed (for instance, it was no longer in a Failed state).

Use the X in the selection bar to clear your selection without acting.

Bulk resend does not carry edits

Editing the recipient, subject, or body only applies when you resend a single email from the detail pane. A bulk resend requeues each selected email exactly as it was queued — it does not pick up changes you typed into the detail pane. If an email needs a correction before it can go out, resend that one individually.

Cancelling a failed email

If an email failed and no longer needs to be sent, cancel it so it stops cluttering the queue:

• One email: open it in the detail pane and click Cancel Email. Aeon confirms "Email cancelled."
• Several emails: check them in the list and click Cancel in the bottom selection bar.

Cancelling sets the email's status to Cancelled. It does not delete the record, and a cancelled email is not retried.

Permissions

• Viewing the Failed Emails queue requires the View level of the Email permission.
• Resending and cancelling — individually or in bulk — require the Email permission at the Edit level. If your role is view-only for email, you can read failed emails and their error notes, but the action buttons won't be available.

Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

A couple of points worth an SME's eye on this page:

• Confirm what marks an email "Failed": the page describes it as a delivery attempt the mail server rejected (commonly a bad address). Confirm that matches how the background mailer actually sets the Failed status, and whether there are other common causes worth naming.
• Bulk-resend-ignores-edits behavior: verified in code (bulk resend sends only the selected IDs, no field changes) — confirm this is the intended product behavior and not a gap to close, since it's an easy thing for staff to get wrong.
• Screenshots needed: (1) the Failed Emails queue split view (list + detail with a visible Error Note); (2) the bottom bulk-selection bar showing Resend / Cancel.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications, i.e. the detail a tool like Claude would need to regenerate this page — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.