Every message leaves through one door

There is one path out of this product for anything sent to a person.

Why that is worth telling you

Because the alternative fails in a specific way that costs your clients.

A messaging rule gets added to the path everyone knows about. Months later a different feature also sends something, through code written before the rule existed. The rule is not applied there, and nobody finds out until a client receives something they had opted out of.

There is one door here, and a check on it applies to everything, including the feature written next year by somebody who has not read this.

What the door checks

The recipient is real and reachable. Not a placeholder, not an address that has never been checked.

It is not a duplicate. The same message to the same person is not sent twice because two things happened that both wanted to send it.

The category is one this recipient accepts. An unsubscribe from your marketing does not stop their settlement reminders, and it does stop the marketing, permanently.

What proves it worked

Open any record and look at Outbound. Every message that left is there, with the recipient, the time and one state.

A message that was suppressed is also there, with the reason. That is the part worth checking: a message that vanishes without a record is the failure this design exists to prevent, and an empty outbound list on a record that should have sent something is a real finding rather than a quiet nothing.

Delivery is a separate fact from sending

Accepted by the receiving server and delivered to an inbox are different things, and the outbound record says which one it knows. A message still in flight reads as queued with its elapsed time, and it does not turn green on its own.

What we will never do

Send from a personal mailbox on your behalf, or send to an address that has not been checked as a monitored mailbox. A notification going somewhere nobody watches is worse than no notification, because it looks like it worked.