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Tracking transactional emails

This page describes how to set up real-time tracking for transactional email campaigns. For more information about the endpoint itself, refer to Send transactional emails using API-triggered delivery.

When you send transactional emails—like order confirmations or password resets—it’s essential to know whether they reach your customers. With Braze transactional HTTP event postbacks, you’ll get real-time insights into the status of every transactional email, so you can act quickly if there’s an issue.

Use this feature to:

  • Monitor your emails in real-time: Immediately see if messages are sent, processed, delivered, or encounter issues.
  • Respond proactively: Retry messages, switch to another channel like SMS, or use fallback systems to make sure your communications are delivered.

Tracking your transactional emails

All transactional emails are complemented with event status postbacks sent as an HTTP request back to your specified URL. This will allow you to evaluate the message status in real-time and take action to reach the user on another channel if the message goes undelivered, or fallback to an internal system if Braze is experiencing latency.

You can associate these updates with individual messages using unique identifiers:

  • dispatch_id: A unique ID Braze automatically generates for each message.
  • external_send_id: A custom identifier you provide, such as an order number, to match updates with your internal systems.

For example, If you include external_send_id: 1234 in the request when sending an order confirmation email, all subsequent event postbacks for that email—like Sent or Delivered—will include external_send_id: 1234. This allows you to confirm whether the customer for order #1234 received their order confirmation email.

Setting up postbacks

In your Braze dashboard:

  1. Go to Settings > Email Preferences.
  2. Under Transactional Event Status Postback, enter the URL where Braze should send status updates for your transactional emails.
  3. Test the postback.

Postback body

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{
  "dispatch_id": (string, a randomly-generated unique ID of the instance of this send),
  "status": (string, Current status of message from the following message status table,
  "metadata" : (object, additional information relating to the execution of an event)
   {
     "external_send_id" : (string, If provided at the time of the request, Braze will pass your internal identifier for this send for all postbacks),
     "campaign_api_id" : (string, API identifier of this transactional campaign),
     "received_at": (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp of when the request was received by Braze, only included for events with "sent" status),
     "enqueued_at": (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp of when the request was enqueued by Braze, only included for events with "sent" status),
     "executed_at": (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp of when the request was processed by Braze, only included for events with "sent" status),
     "sent_at": (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp of when the request was sent to the ESP by Braze, only included for events with "sent" status),
     "processed_at" : (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp the event was processed by the ESP, only included for events with "processed" status),
     "delivered_at" : (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp the event was delivered to the user's inbox provider, only included for events with "processed" status),
     "bounced_at" : (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp the event was bounced by the user's inbox provider, only included for events with "bounced" status),
     "aborted_at" : (ISO 8601 DateTime string, Timestamp the event was Aborted by Braze, only included for events with "aborted" status),
     "reason" : (string, The reason Braze or the Inbox provider was unable to process this message to the user, only included for events with "aborted" or "bounced" status),
   }
}

Message status

Example postback

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// Sent Event
{
    "dispatch_id": "acf471119f7449d579e8089032003ded",
    "status": "sent",
    "metadata": {
      "received_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:41.000+00:00",
      "enqueued_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:41.000+00:00",
      "executed_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:41.000+00:00",
      "sent_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:42.000+00:00",
      "campaign_api_id": "417220e4-5a2a-b634-7f7d-9ec891532368",
      "external_send_id" : "34a2ceb3cf6184132f3d816e9984269a"
    }
}

// Processed Event
{
    "dispatch_id": "acf471119f7449d579e8089032003ded",
    "status": "processed",
    "metadata": {
      "processed_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:42.000+00:00",
      "campaign_api_id": "417220e4-5a2a-b634-7f7d-9ec891532368",
      "external_send_id" : "34a2ceb3cf6184132f3d816e9984269a"
    }
}

// Aborted
{
    "dispatch_id": "acf471119f7449d579e8089032003ded",
    "status": "aborted",
    "metadata": {
      "reason": "User not emailable",
      "aborted_at": "2020-08-31T19:04:51.000+00:00",
      "campaign_api_id": "417220e4-5a2a-b634-7f7d-9ec891532368",
      "external_send_id" : "34a2ceb3cf6184132f3d816e9984269a"
    }
}

// Delivered Event
{
    "dispatch_id": "acf471119f7449d579e8089032003ded",
    "status": "delivered",
    "metadata": {
      "delivered_at": "2020-08-31T18:27:32.000+00:00",
      "campaign_api_id": "417220e4-5a2a-b634-7f7d-9ec891532368",
      "external_send_id" : "34a2ceb3cf6184132f3d816e9984269a"
    }
}

// Bounced Event
{
    "dispatch_id": "acf471119f7449d579e8089032003ded",
    "status": "bounced",
    "metadata": {
      "bounced_at": "2020-08-31T18:58:43.000+00:00",
      "reason": "550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist",
      "campaign_api_id": "417220e4-5a2a-b634-7f7d-9ec891532368",
      "external_send_id" : "34a2ceb3cf6184132f3d816e9984269a"
    }
}
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