Email sending and the Outbox

One switch controls whether your organization’s outgoing email actually leaves the platform. When it is off, nothing is silently dropped: the Outbox keeps a record of every message the platform tried to send, so you can see what would have gone out.

When you’d use it

• Turn email off during a trial, a demo, or a test run, without removing notification rules or templates.
• Check what would have been sent before turning email on for the first time.
• Investigate a message a user says they never received.

What you manage

The switch and the Outbox live under Automate → Notifications → Outbox (/admin/notifications?tab=outbox), and a card on the organization setup page links here too.

• The switch. On by default. Turning it off stops every outgoing tenant email at the one place all of them pass through, so no notification rule, password reset, or workflow email action needs its own switch.
• The Outbox. Every email the platform tried to send, newest first: who it was sent to, the subject, a short preview of the body, and one of four states.
  • Sent. Delivered.
  • Not sent. The switch was off, or the message was never meant to send for another reason (a dry run, a cancellation).
  • Failed. The platform tried to deliver it and could not.
  • Waiting. Still queued, not processed yet.
• Filter the Outbox by status or by date, and open a row to see the message as the recipient would have seen it: an HTML tab rendered the way the email client would show it, and a Text tab with the plain-text body. A link to the record the message came from sits below.

Good to know

• A password-reset email’s body is never stored, on or off. The Outbox still shows that one was attempted, with its status and reason, but not its content: the detail dialog has no HTML tab for it, only the Text tab, which shows that the body was redacted rather than the one-time link.
• Platform sign-up email is outside this switch. The message that invites someone to create their own tenant has no tenant yet to turn off, so it always sends through its own path.
• Turning the switch off does not change notification rules or templates. It only stops delivery; the rules keep firing and keep queuing, so turning email back on resumes exactly where it left off.

How it connects

The switch and the Outbox sit on top of Notifications: the same queue, the same delivery channel, the same retry behavior. Nothing here changes who gets notified or what a message says, only whether the email channel actually sends.

• Exact shapes: table fl_notification_queue; every term in the glossary.