Notifications and Emails Not Arriving

Someone was supposed to get an email from Pactly and it never showed up. It might have been an approval request, a submission acknowledgment, or a message on a contract. Most of the time the email was sent, and the cause is on the receiving side or in who was selected to receive it, not a fault in Pactly.

Work through the checks below in order. They go from the most common cause (deliverability) to configuration, and each one ends with the fix.

Likely cause: the message was delivered but filed somewhere other than the inbox, or it was blocked before it arrived.

Check and fix:

• Search spam, junk, and quarantine. Pactly emails come from a Pactly sending address. Search the recipient’s spam and junk folders, and any organization-wide quarantine, for recent mail from Pactly. Mark it “not spam” so future messages land in the inbox.
• Check filters and rules. A mailbox rule or shared-inbox filter can auto-archive or redirect Pactly mail before the person sees it. Look for a rule matching the Pactly sender or subject.
• Allow-list the sender. If messages are being blocked outright, ask your IT team to allow-list Pactly’s sending domain so mail isn’t rejected at the gateway.

Likely cause: the recipient was never selected, or a different recipient was chosen by mistake. Pactly only emails the people attached to that action.

Check and fix:

• Confirm a recipient was selected. For a message sent from a contract’s timeline, the email only goes out if a recipient is chosen on the message. If the message was sent with no recipient, no notification is generated, so re-send it with the recipient added. If you did select a recipient and still nothing went out, that can be a notification fault on our side, so contact support (see below).
• Confirm the recipient’s address. Pactly sends to the email address on the person’s user account or contact record. If that address is wrong or outdated, the email goes to the wrong place. Correct the address and re-trigger the action.
• Check the right party is on the contract. Submission and acknowledgment emails go to the requester and any contacts on the contract. If the wrong contact is listed, the wrong person is notified.

Likely cause: approvals follow the workflow’s routing and signing order, so the approver may not have been routed the contract, or it isn’t their turn yet.

Check and fix:

• Check the contract actually entered approval. An approval email is only sent when a contract is routed for approval. If the contract is still in Draft or In Negotiation, no approval request has gone out yet.
• Check whose turn it is. With sequential approvals, Pactly emails one approver at a time and only notifies the next person once the previous one has acted. An approver later in the chain won’t receive anything until it reaches them. With parallel approvals, everyone is notified at once.
• Check the routing conditions. If approvals route by category, value, or properties, the contract only reaches an approver when its details match that path’s conditions. A contract that doesn’t match any path skips that approver entirely. Review how the path is set up in Routing Approvals.
• Check the approver’s role and access. If the intended approver can’t see or act on the contract at all, confirm their role and group access. See Why Can’t This User Do X?.

Likely cause: the email arrived but the branding, sender name, or wording isn’t what you expected. This is account-level configuration, not a delivery problem.

Check and fix:

• Logo or branding. Outgoing email branding is set once for the whole account. See Add Your Company Logo to Emails.
• Sender domain. If emails should come from your own domain, that depends on domain setup. See Verify and Lock Your Email Domain.

If you’ve confirmed the recipient was selected, the address is correct, the contract reached the right stage, and the message isn’t in spam, and the email still doesn’t arrive, contact support at [email protected]. Some notification failures are caused by issues on our side that we patch directly, so include:

• Who should have received the email and their address
• The contract reference and the action that should have triggered it (approval request, message, submission)
• Roughly when it should have been sent

• Troubleshooting
• Login & Access Issues
• Routing Approvals by Category, Value, and Properties
• Why Can’t This User Do X?
• Send Signature Reminders
• Add Your Company Logo to Emails