A customer says no confirmation arrived, or your own admin alerts have gone quiet. Before you change any settings, find out what actually happened to the email. MenuDock records every send attempt, so the answer is almost always sitting in the email log. This article walks you through reading it and fixing the most common causes.
Start with the email log
Open Settings → Notifications → Email, then use View logs. The log lives at /admin/settings/notifications/email/logs. For a tour of the viewer and its filters, see Browse the email log.
Every email MenuDock tries to send writes exactly one row here, whether it went out, failed, or was skipped. So your first job is to find the row for the email you were expecting. Filter by the customer's address under Recipient contains, or by the notification type, then read the Status column.
Before you go further, one thing catches people out often: the customer confirmation email only fires once an order reaches received, which is the point Stripe confirms payment. If an order is stuck at pending, payment never landed, so no confirmation is expected and you won't see a row for it. If that sounds like your case, read my order didn't arrive instead.
What each status means and what to do
Match the Status on the row to the list below. The friendly label in the table is shown first, with the underlying status key in brackets.
- Sent (
sent) — MenuDock handed the email to the provider successfully. If the customer still says nothing arrived, the problem is downstream of MenuDock. Ask them to check spam and junk folders, and confirm the Recipient address on the row is actually theirs and spelled correctly. A typo at checkout is a common culprit. - Failed (
failed) — the provider rejected or errored on the send. The row carries the error message, so read it first. If you've connected your own email provider, this is nearly always a wrong API key or an unverified sender address. See the next section. If you're on MenuDock's shared service and still see Failed, contact support. - Disabled (
skipped_disabled) — that email type is switched off, so nothing was sent. This is a deliberate skip, not a fault. If you want it sending, turn the notification back on under Settings → Notifications → Email. - No recipient (
skipped_missing_recipient) — MenuDock had no address to send to. For a customer email that usually means a guest order placed without an email address. For an admin email it means your admin notification address is blank, so set one under Sender settings on the email notifications page. - Rate-limited (
skipped_rate_limit) — an identical email had just gone out, so this duplicate was suppressed. There's normally nothing to fix here. Only the integration-problem admin alert is throttled, at most once per hour, so a broken integration can't flood your inbox.
Using your own email provider
If you've connected your own provider (Brevo, SMTP, Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailjet or Resend) and sends are showing Failed, the cause is on the provider side, not in MenuDock.
Re-check two things on the Integrations page, in the Email provider section:
- The API key is current and pasted in full. Keys get rotated or revoked, and a stale one fails every send.
- The from-address is one your provider has verified you can send from. Verification happens in the provider's own dashboard, not in MenuDock. A "sender not verified" error in the log points straight here.
For the full setup, see Connect your own email provider. To switch back to the shared service while you sort it out, use the Activate button on the MenuDock default card.
Nothing in the log at all
If there's no row for an email you expected, MenuDock never attempted it, which means the event that triggers it never happened. The usual reason is the order never reached received because payment wasn't confirmed, so no confirmation was ever due. Check the order's status, and if it's stuck at pending follow my order didn't arrive.
If you're sure a paid order ran but the log is still empty, check your filters aren't hiding the row. Press Reset, then look again.
Related articles
- Browse the email log
- Which emails MenuDock sends
- Connect your own email provider
- my order didn't arrive
Need a hand?
If a row shows Failed on MenuDock's shared service, or the log is empty for an order you know was paid, email support@menudock.co.uk with the order number and we'll trace the send.