When Aiwyn sends an invoice, statement, or payment email on your firm's behalf, the Email Delivery Hub records what happened to it. Those records are useful, but they cover less than they appear to. This article explains what the hub can and cannot tell you, and why a failed email usually shows up as a collections problem before anyone recognizes it as an email problem.
What the hub records
The hub is under Clients & Contacts in the Firm Portal. It lists the client emails Aiwyn sends for your firm — invoices, smart statements, payment confirmations and failures, and other types depending on the products your firm uses.
When Aiwyn sends an email, it passes it to the recipient's mail server. That server accepts or rejects it, and the result comes back to the hub as a status:
- Sending — the email is on its way, and no result has come back yet.
- Delivered — the recipient's mail server accepted it.
- Opened — the email was opened, as far as the hub can detect.
- Clicked — someone selected a link in the email.
- Bounced — the recipient's mail server rejected it.
- Mixed — the email had several recipients with different outcomes. Expand the row to see each one.
Each status builds on the one before: an opened email was delivered, and a clicked email was delivered too. See Email delivery status reference for the full definitions.
Delivered means accepted, not read
Delivered means the recipient's mail server accepted the email. That is the last point at which Aiwyn can see anything.
After that, the email can land in a junk folder, be moved to a subfolder by a rule, or sit unread. None of that reaches the hub. A delivered invoice that goes unpaid is evidence that the client's mail server took it — not that the client saw it.
Opens are undercounted
An open is recorded when the email loads a small tracking image. Email clients that block images never load it, so a recipient can read an entire invoice and register no open at all.
That makes Opened a floor, not a measurement:
- A change in your open rate over time can be meaningful. The rate on its own is not.
- A difference between two clients' open rates may reflect their email settings rather than their attention.
- An email with no recorded open is not evidence that a particular person did not read it.
Clicked is more dependable, because it takes a deliberate action — but it only tells you about recipients who had a reason to follow a link.
Bounced is not the same as never sent
A bounce means the email left Aiwyn and the recipient's mail server turned it away. There are two kinds, and they call for different responses:
- Soft bounce — temporary, such as a full mailbox or a mail server that was briefly unavailable. The address itself is fine, and a later attempt may succeed.
- Hard bounce — permanent. The address or domain does not exist. After a hard bounce, Aiwyn stops sending to that address, so every later email to it fails too — until the address is corrected and Aiwyn Support lifts the block.
The failure reason shown on a bounced email is not always specific. Many bounces currently show a general mail server error rather than the underlying cause.
An email that never left Aiwyn is different again — for example, an invoice with no recipient address on file. It did not bounce, because it was never sent, so it does not appear on the Sent tab. Some firms also have Pending and Failed tabs that list these emails. Without them, an email that was never sent does not show up in the hub at all.
A resend fixes one email, not the contact record
When you resend an email from the hub, you can preview it, edit the subject, add a note, change the recipients, and send yourself a test first. Resends go one at a time.
Changing a recipient in the resend dialog affects only that send. It does not update the contact record, so next month's invoice goes to the same wrong address and bounces again. Correct the address where it is managed — in your practice management system if your firm syncs contacts, or on the contact in Clients & Contacts if the contact is Aiwyn-managed. See Troubleshoot a failed client email.
When a resend of a bounced email is delivered, the hub clears the original bounce at its next refresh, and your bounce count drops. That confirms the one email arrived. It does not confirm the contact record was fixed.
The hub shows the recent past
The hub refreshes on a cycle rather than instantly, so what you see can be a few minutes behind. An email you just resent will not appear straight away, and a status you are watching may already have changed.
This matters most when you are on the phone with a client. Before telling a client an email failed, allow for the refresh and check again.
Why a failed email is a collections problem
A firm's collections timeline starts when the client sees the invoice. If the email never arrived, that clock never started — and nothing in a firm's normal billing process will reveal it. The invoice looks sent, the balance ages, and the client is not late so much as unaware. The firm ends up chasing a balance the client does not know exists, and the conversation starts badly.
Repeated failures are usually data, not email. A single bounce is an incident. The same client failing every month is a record problem — a wrong address or an incomplete contact — and it recurs until someone fixes the record, costing another cycle of aging each time. That is why it is worth reviewing failures as a set: the same client, the same email type, the same cause.
What the hub is good for
Within those limits, the hub answers the questions that come up most:
- Did we send it, and when?
- Did the address work, or did it bounce — and was that temporary or permanent?
- Which recipients on a multi-recipient email failed?
- Are our failures rising? The summary cards compare each count with the previous period.
- Which clients fail again and again? Export the table to look for patterns.
Related
- Email delivery status reference
- Email Delivery Hub reference
- Troubleshoot a failed client email
- Find and resend a client email
- Undelivered email insights report reference