Email you send from Pipeline arrives from our servers with your name on it. When one doesn't land, a short list of causes accounts for nearly all of it.
Introduction
You sent something from Pipeline and the person on the other end says it never came. Maybe it bounced straight back, maybe it just went quiet, and the address is one you've mailed a hundred times before.
Nearly every case comes down to the same thing. Mail from Pipeline leaves our servers rather than your office's, and the recipient's mail server has to accept it before anything else can happen. Whether it was accepted is a fact we can look up. Everything after that point happens inside their mail system, where our record ends: spam folders, office filters, forwarding rules.
Knowing which side of that line a message stopped on tells you who can fix it, and the answer is usually short either way.
How It Works
Your message leaves our servers, the recipient's server accepts it or refuses it, and what happens next depends on which.
Where Your Message Comes From
Mail you send from Pipeline goes out from help@paperlesspipeline.com with your name in the from line, and replies come back to you. Sending from our address instead of the agent's is what makes real spoofing hard. The cost is that a strict filter at the receiving office can read the gap between the name and the address as a warning sign, so allowlisting help@paperlesspipeline.com settles it and leaves the filter free to catch actual scammers.
What Stops a Message Arriving
Five things account for nearly all of it, and each one clears a different way.
| What happened | What it does | What clears it |
|---|---|---|
| Their mail server rejected the message outright | The address lands on the Bounce List and Pipeline stops sending to it | Support clears the address |
| Someone marked a Pipeline message as spam | The address lands on the Spam Reports list, with the same effect | Support clears it. Unsubscribe or change the setting instead of marking it spam |
| A strict filter at the receiving office | Messages are held or dropped before they reach the inbox | Allowlist help@paperlesspipeline.com |
| Their email provider having a bad hour | Delivery slows or is refused for a while | Clears on its own |
| Your own send limit | 80 emails in a rolling hour, and 300 across 12 hours, to protect delivery for everyone | Resets on its own once the window passes |
Nothing That Failed Gets Resent
A bounce notice means that message failed for good. Pipeline doesn't retry it, and it won't go out on its own once the cause clears, so anything you saw a notice for has to be sent again by hand. Our delivery record ends the moment the receiving server accepts a message: after that, one that never reaches an inbox is sitting in a spam folder or a forwarding rule, and the recipient's mail administrator has the rest of the story.
Find Out Whether a Message Was Delivered
Establish whether a message left Pipeline and whether the recipient's server took it, before anyone starts guessing.
Who Can Do This: Anyone who can open the transaction the message was sent from.
To find out whether a message was delivered:
- Open the transaction and find the message under Notes & Sent Emails. Its presence there confirms it left Pipeline, and when.
- Check whether a bounce notice came back. Every message that fails generates one, so a notice tells you it failed and a missing notice tells you it didn't.
- If it left and no notice arrived, email help@paperlesspipeline.com with the recipient's address and roughly when you sent it.
- Support reads the delivery record and tells you whether the receiving server accepted the message — which decides whether the rest of the trail is ours or theirs.
When One Person Stops Getting Anything
When it's one address rather than a general slowness, the address itself has usually been suppressed, and it stays that way until somebody clears it.
When a recipient's mail server rejects a message, their address lands on Pipeline's Bounce List and sending stops until it's cleared.
See Bounce List
What Your Recipient Sees in the From Line
Before you ask an IT team to allowlist anything, it helps to be able to tell them exactly what to look for.
Emails you send out of Pipeline arrive from help@paperlesspipeline.com with your name on them, and replies come back to you.
Email Deliverability FAQ
Answers to the common questions about bounces, allowlisting, send limits, and what happens to mail that failed.