How E-mail Fits Together

Sending e-mail involves five things. Knowing which is which makes both configuration and troubleshooting straightforward.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Integration & Connections:

E-mail Accounts — the accounts mail is sent and received through

Architect Panel → Activity:

E-mail Log — every message sent, with its result

Architect Panel → Layout & Pages:

E-mail Designs — the wrapper
E-mail Templates — the message

The five pieces

Account — the mailbox and credentials mail is sent through, and its from address.
Design — the wrapper: header, styling, footer.
Template — the message: subject, body, merge fields.
The send — something deciding to send, with a record to merge in.
The log — what was actually sent and what happened to it.

They are separate on purpose

Each changes for different reasons. Credentials change when your provider does; the design changes at a rebrand; a template changes when the wording does. Keeping them apart means one change touches one thing.

Which piece is wrong?

Most e-mail problems resolve quickly once you identify the layer:

Nothing sends at all — the account. Credentials, or the provider refusing.
One message does not send — the log will say why; usually the recipient address.
It sends but looks wrong — the design, or a template carrying its own layout.
It sends but says the wrong thing — the template, or a merge field with nothing behind it.
The wrong person got it — whatever chose the recipient, not the mail system.

Start at the log

Always. It answers whether the message was sent, to what address, with what content and with what result — which usually narrows the problem to one layer immediately.

Guessing before reading the log is how an afternoon disappears.

Sent is not delivered

The distinction to hold on to. A successful result means the platform handed the message to the account without error. Whether the recipient's server accepted it, and whether anybody read it, are different questions.

Most "we never received it" cases involve a message the log shows as sent successfully.

Mail is not guaranteed

Filtering, full mailboxes, greylisting and typos all intervene. Where something genuinely must reach somebody, do not rely on e-mail alone — and never treat a successful send as evidence they were told.

Worked example

A customer reports not receiving an invoice. The log shows it sent successfully to an address one character out; the activity log shows that address entered three weeks earlier during a call. Corrected, resent, and the cause explained — four minutes, because the log came first.

Recommendations

Identify the layer before investigating.
Read the log first, every time.
Say "sent", not "received" when answering customers.
Keep a second channel for anything that must arrive.