The enquiry is safe even when the email is not

A visitor filled in the form asking to be contacted, they saw the thank you, and nobody received an email.

In rough order of how often each one turns out to be the answer. Work down rather than across: each carries a way to tell whether it is yours before you change anything.

• 1

  The notification address was never set, so it went to the workspace owner

  Why

  Notifications go to the address set on that assistant. Where there is not one, they fall back to the address of the person who owns the workspace, which is often whoever signed up rather than whoever answers enquiries.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Open the enquiries for that assistant. The one you are chasing is there, and it is marked as notified. Delivery worked, so the only question left is where it went: check the inbox of the account that owns the workspace.

  Fix

  Set the notification address on the assistant. A shared inbox is worth using rather than a person, because a personal address makes every enquiry invisible to the rest of the team on the day that person is away.

• 2

  It was delivered and then filtered

  Why

  The message comes from the product's sending domain rather than from your own, and its reply address is the visitor, who is a stranger to your mail server. An unfamiliar sender carrying an unfamiliar reply address is the exact shape a spam filter is built to catch, and the very first message to reach an address is the most likely to be caught.

  How to confirm it is this one

  The enquiry is in the list and marked as notified, and a search of the whole mailbox, spam and quarantine included, for the visitor's name or address finds it. Check any corporate quarantine separately, since it often does not show up in an ordinary mailbox search.

  Fix

  Allowlist the sender in your own rules, and if your mail passes through a corporate gateway, have it allowed there as well. Once one message is accepted the rest usually follow it through.

• 3

  The provider refused that particular message

  Why

  A malformed address, a mailbox that no longer exists, or a recipient suppressed after an earlier bounce all end the same way: the send is attempted, it is refused, and the record is stored with delivery unset.

  How to confirm it is this one

  In the enquiries list this one is not marked as notified while others from around the same time are. One failure among successes points at the recipient rather than at the setup.

  Fix

  Read the notification address again character by character, because a typo fails every time and looks exactly like an outage. If the address is right and ordinary mail reaches it, put a different address on the assistant briefly to prove the problem is the recipient and not the assistant.

• 4

  No email provider is configured at all

  Why

  On an install you run yourself, mail goes out through a provider you configure. Where there is none the message is written to the logs instead of being sent, which is what makes local development possible without an account anywhere. Nothing about the enquiry changes; only the notification is skipped.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Every enquiry in the list is unmarked for delivery, not only this one, and none has ever been marked. A run of failures with no successes anywhere is the signature of a missing provider rather than of a mail problem.

  Fix

  Configure an email provider for the install. Until you do, work from the enquiries list, which has been complete the whole time.

The reply address on the notification is the visitor's own, and it is set only when there is one, so replying to the email answers the person directly rather than starting a thread with a product. If you would rather answer from the dashboard, the enquiry carries both the visitor's address and the conversation it came out of, which is usually better context than the email gives you.

Can notifications go to more than one address?

One address per assistant, with the workspace owner as the fallback. If several people need to see enquiries, point it at a shared inbox or a distribution address. That is more reliable than a list of individuals for the same reason a rota is more reliable than a favour.

Why does the visitor see a thank you when nothing was sent?

Because they did their part and the record exists. Telling somebody that their message failed when it did not would invite them to send it again, and you would receive the same enquiry twice with no way to tell which was which.

Why not copy every enquiry to a backup inbox as insurance?

Because that inbox would not be yours. Routing one customer's enquiries anywhere other than their own address is a leak, and a quiet one, so a platform wide fallback is deliberately not offered even as a safety net.