Email delivery & unsubscribe

HowlOps sends two kinds of email, and treats them differently.

Critical vs. non-critical mail

Critical (transactional) mail is anything you need to operate or secure your account. It is always delivered and never carries an unsubscribe link:

• password reset
• email verification
• multi-factor authentication
• security notices
• billing and dunning (payment failed, trial ending, receipts)

Non-critical mail is everything else — the daily digest, the first-monitor setup nudge, and any product announcements. Every non-critical message includes a one-click Unsubscribe header (RFC 8058), so most mail clients show an Unsubscribe button you can use directly from your inbox.

Unsubscribing from non-critical mail never affects critical mail: you will still receive password resets and billing notices.

Bounces and spam complaints

To protect deliverability for everyone, HowlOps maintains a suppression list:

• Hard bounce (the address does not exist / permanently rejects mail) → the address is suppressed for all mail, including transactional. Fix the address on your account to resume delivery.
• Spam complaint (you marked a message as spam) → the address is suppressed for non-critical mail only. Critical mail (password reset, billing) still gets through.
• Unsubscribe (one-click) → same as a complaint: non-critical mail stops, critical mail continues.

Suppression is per email address and applies platform-wide, because mailbox providers judge sender reputation per sending domain, not per workspace.

Retries

Transactional mail that can't be delivered immediately (a transient relay outage) is retried with exponential backoff for a bounded number of attempts before it is dead-lettered and surfaced to the operators. Delivery is at-least-once: in a rare crash window a message may be delivered more than once, but never lost silently.