[Solved] Email throttled on a single email event

Help
1

Hi

I have a couple of workflows defined that should send an email when assets go offline.
I didn’t receive a recent email, so I had a look at the workflow.

BY manually triggering the event, I am able to trigger the email send, however even for a single email with no other activity debug tells me that the email was throttled.

Email
Losant Email Send Throttled
Thu Dec 1 2016 07:40:08 GMT+08:00
Full payload:
{
“time”: “2016-11-30T23:40:04.063Z”,
“data”: {},
“applicationId”: “578880e66e6a550100c80340”,
“triggerId”: “578d9f6526434a01005416c1-SJOpzkTze”,
“triggerType”: “virtualButton”,
“relayId”: “57749260cabe830100a24bb6”,
“relayType”: “user”,
“flowId”: “578d9f6526434a01005416c1”,
“flowName”: “MKO Network online”,
“applicationName”: “Mount Keith”,
“globals”: {}
}

Not sure why it should be throttled. I think also that if an email has been throttled there should be some permament log of that fact.

How can I diagnose why email is being throttled ?

Thanks

Tim

2

No I went back through the event logs and on the 27th and 28th their would have been a lot of emails sent due to a series of fluctuating events. So I could understand the throttling. However I haven’t received an email at any point.

So that raises a few questions.

  1. What is an acceptable rate before throttling?
  2. Is throttling applied to the account, the project or just the workflow ?
  3. Also what is the throttled period. ie 5 emails in 24 hour period, or are we throttled for longer periods ?
  4. How do we find out if we have been throttled other than looking at the debug log of a workflow.

Thanks

Tim

3

So the built in Losant email and sms nodes are throttled to prevent their use for spam. You can read about the throttling in their documentation (https://docs.losant.com/workflows/outputs/email/). They are throttled to a rate of one call into the node per minute, and the throttle operates on each instance of an email node individually. If you need to send a lot of email, we recommend signing up for a SendGrid account and using our SendGrid Node.

As far as looking at the history of throttling in the workflow, we unfortunately do not yet have workflow history exposed in the Losant UI. We do, however, keep detailed logs of all workflow runs and they can be accessed through the Workflow Logs api endpoint - which would show you what workflow runs have and have not had errors.

On top of all that, I just went and looked at our detailed email logs in SendGrid (we use SendGrid behind the scenes for the regular email node), and it looks like we are getting a lot of bounced undeliverable messages for what I think is your email (don’t want to drop the details in here because it is a public forum - but I can send you an email with more details if you want).

4

Hi

Thanks for looking at this.

I doubt we would hit the 1 email a minute. And never would thankfully, other than through error on my part.

Email being sent to is thoffman@nationalpump.com.au

Which I have checked (not from losant) and it isn’t bouncing, so would be very interested to work out why it is bouncing.

Thanks

Tim

5

I dug through the SendGrid stuff and found that your email address originally bounced on:

Aug 24, 2016 5:19:58 PM
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

Apparently SendGrid remembers hard bounces like that, and then never tries to deliver to that address again. I’ve removed your address from the list of “failed addresses” that SendGrid remembers, and looking at the logs, it looks like an email just went through to you!

6

Yep

Just got some emails.

Not sure why we would have ever generated a hard bounce. Thanks for solving this one.
I think I need to look at an additional channel of notification just in case.

Regards

Tim