Sending transactional email

Letterhead’s transactional email feature lets you send triggered or one-off transactional messages — receipts, confirmations, notifications — separate from your regular newsletter sends. Transactional email is an early access feature: it has to be enabled for your company, so ask your administrator or contact Letterhead support if you don’t see it.

What transactional email is for

Newsletters go to your whole audience or a segment on a schedule you choose. Transactional emails typically go to a single recipient, triggered by something they did — a purchase, a signup, a password reset. Because they’re expected by the recipient, they’re sent independently of your newsletter campaigns.

Organize sends with tags

Tags let you group related transactional sends (for example, receipt or welcome) so you can analyze performance by type later. Every tagged send rolls up into per-tag metrics.

Track performance

Once transactional email is enabled, a Transactionals page appears under Resources in your channel’s sidebar. For each tag it shows:

• Sends — how many emails were sent
• Open rate and Click rate — the share of recipients who opened, or clicked a link
• Bounce rate — the share that failed to deliver
• Spam rate — the share marked as spam
• Refused — how many emails the sending provider would not send (a count, not a percentage)
• Last sent — when that kind of email last went out

Use the search and date filters to focus on one kind of email or one stretch of time.

See each send and why one was refused

Under each tag, choose Show sends to list that tag’s newest 100 sends in the date range you’ve picked. Each row shows the send ID (the same uniqueId your send request returned), its status (queued, accepted, refused, delivered, bounced, or marked as spam), the reason for any refused or bounced email, and when it was last updated. Choose Hide sends to close the list; changing the date range closes it too.

Ask Penpal instead

Open Penpal with the speech-bubble button in the top bar, or connect an AI tool such as Claude Desktop, and ask in plain words, for example “How did receipts perform in June?” or “Show me password reset email performance for the last week”. Penpal returns send counts and open, click, bounce and spam rates, grouped by tag, for whatever period you name.

Check what happened to a send

When you send a transactional email through the API, the response includes a uniqueId for that send. Use it to look the send up later and see where it stands:

GET /api/v3/transactionals/{uniqueId}

The lookup only returns sends from your own company. The response has a status, a reason and an updatedAt time. status is one of:

• queued — Letterhead has the email and is about to hand it off.
• accepted — our sending provider took the email.
• refused — the provider would not send it. reason holds the provider’s code and message.
• delivered — the email reached the recipient’s mail server.
• bounced — the recipient’s mail server sent it back. reason holds the bounce code and message.
• spam_complaint — the recipient reported the email as spam.

reason is empty unless the email was refused or bounced. A refused or bounced email often comes down to the recipient’s address, so the reason is there to help you fix it on your side.

You can also see the status of each send on the Transactionals page — see See each send and why one was refused.