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Email Delivery Failed

Reference · Errors

email_delivery_failed503

Infrastructure · Magic link and password reset emails

We couldn't send the email. Nothing else changed; try again in a minute.

What this means​

A request needed to send an email right away (a password reset link) and our email provider rejected the send or timed out. The account, its keys and sessions are unchanged; the only thing that didn't happen is the email.

When you'll see this​

  • Forgot password was submitted while our email provider was down or rate-limiting us.
Learn more about how this works

Email delivery is the one part of any auth system that genuinely depends on third parties. Even at perfect uptime on our side, the provider can have a bad five minutes. We surface this as a clean 503 instead of pretending the email went through — that way your retry logic actually retries, and the user isn't left wondering why no link arrived.

The most common gotcha: this error means we couldn't send the email. If the request succeeded but the email never arrived, check the spam folder before assuming it failed.

Example response​

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "email_delivery_failed",
  "message": "We are having trouble sending email right now. Please try again in a few minutes.",
  "details": [],
  "retry_after": null,
  "doc_url": "https://docs.asterwise.com/reference/errors/email_delivery_failed/",
  "request_id": "req_01HXYZABCDEFGH",
  "timestamp": "2026-05-25T12:34:56Z"
}
NEW TO APIS?
Quick fix
  1. Wait a minute and submit Forgot password again.
  2. If it fails twice in a row, check status.asterwise.com.
  3. If requests succeed but emails never arrive, the issue is deliverability (spam, blocklists, company filters), not this error.
PRODUCTION ENGINEER
Recovery pattern

Only the dashboard's sign-in pages receive this error; API keys never see it, and nothing in an integration needs to handle it.

Production handler​

No code example provided.

Avoid this error by​

  • Add [email protected] to your contacts so account emails aren't filtered.
  • Keep the account on an address you read; that is where reset and billing emails go.