Email logs
Email Logs
The Email Logs screen is your window into every automated email that DPMS has sent on your organisation's behalf. Whether you're an IT admin tracking down a missing notification, a DPO building an audit trail for a regulatory submission, or a compliance officer confirming that a bulk policy update reached all employees, this is the one place where all outbound email activity is recorded and inspectable. It sits inside IT Settings and complements the Workflow engine — because every workflow that contains an email step writes a permanent record here the moment it fires.
How to open it
Navigate to IT Settings in the left-hand menu, then click Email Logs in the sidebar. The full path is IT Settings › Email Logs.
This screen is only visible to users whose role includes the read permission for the Email Logs section of IT Settings. If you try to access the URL directly without the right permission, DPMS shows a standard "403 Forbidden" page.
What you see
The screen follows the standard IT Settings two-column layout. On the left is the IT Settings sidebar, listing all sections your role gives you access to — General, Active Directory, IAM, AI, Virus Scanner, Email Logs, and others. The Email Logs item is highlighted. The sidebar stays fixed as you scroll.
The right side is the main content area, which opens with a breadcrumb reading IT Settings › Email Logs. Below that is a full-width data table. Above the table you'll notice a single tab labelled All — this confirms that all log entries are shown without any pre-filtering. At the moment there is no separate "Failed" or "Sent" tab, though the table design is ready for those in a future release.
The table itself lists one row per outgoing email, with seven columns: From, Workflow Name, Recipients, Subject, Message, Status, and Sent At. There are no buttons for creating, editing, or deleting records — this is a read-only log viewer. Older entries load automatically as you scroll down, so you never need to click a "Next page" button.
Working with this screen
Checking whether a specific email was sent
The most common reason to visit this screen is to confirm whether a particular email was actually dispatched. Start by scrolling through the Recipients column looking for the address you care about. Because logs load newest-first, if the email you're looking for was sent recently it should appear near the top.
Once you spot the right row, check the Status column. A status indicating successful delivery (typically "sent") means the platform handed the message to the mail server. A failure status means something went wrong at delivery time — and you now have the evidence you need to dig deeper. You can then click the link in the Workflow Name column to jump directly to the workflow that triggered the send, which will help you understand whether the template, the trigger conditions, or the recipient rules need to be adjusted.
If you scroll all the way through the list and find no entry at all for the recipient and timeframe you expected, that is equally informative: it means the workflow never fired for that case, and your investigation should shift to the workflow's trigger conditions rather than the email delivery layer.
Auditing email notifications for a compliance deadline
When a regulator or internal auditor asks you to demonstrate that required notifications were sent — for example, a data-breach alert within the 72-hour GDPR window — the Email Logs screen is your primary source of evidence.
Navigate to IT Settings › Email Logs and scroll through the Sent At column, looking for entries that fall within the relevant time window. The records are sorted most-recent-first, so if the incident was recent you won't need to scroll far. For each relevant row, cross-check the Subject column to confirm it matches the expected notification template, and check the Recipients column to confirm the right addresses — including the supervisory authority — appear. The Status column confirms successful delivery. Note the exact timestamps from Sent At for your regulatory submission; these are formatted in your configured locale and timezone.
If you need to understand the exact content that was sent, the Message column shows the email body or a summary of it.
Tracing an unexpected or confusing email back to its source
When a user or data subject contacts you about an email they received but didn't expect, you can use the log to trace exactly where it came from.
Go to IT Settings › Email Logs and scan the From column combined with the approximate Sent At time to narrow down the candidate rows. Once you find the right entry, read the Subject and Message columns to confirm it matches the email in question. Then click the link in the Workflow Name column — this takes you directly to the Workflow Editor for the specific workflow that produced this email. There you can review the trigger conditions, the recipient rules, and the email template, and decide whether to modify or disable the email action.
Tip: If the Workflow Name cell is blank, the email was generated by the platform itself (for example, a password reset or a system alert) rather than by a workflow you configured. This is expected behaviour.
Confirming a bulk notification reached all intended recipients
After a policy update or a company-wide announcement sent via workflows, you may want to spot-check that the notification reached different people across the organisation.
Go to IT Settings › Email Logs and scroll to the entries dated around the time the workflow ran. Check the Subject column to confirm the expected subject line appears across multiple rows, then sample several rows to verify that different employee addresses appear in the Recipients column. The presence of multiple rows — each with a successful Status — confirms the bulk send ran as intended. If you see far fewer rows than expected, check whether the workflow's recipient rules are correctly configured.
Field reference
Field | What it shows |
|---|---|
From | The sender label or address. This value is translated through the platform's language settings, so it may show a human-readable system name rather than a raw email address. |
Workflow Name | The name of the workflow that triggered this email. Shown as a clickable link when the email originated from a workflow; blank when it came from a built-in system process. |
Recipients | The email address or addresses the message was sent to. Multiple recipients may appear as a list. |
Subject | The subject line of the email, exactly as it was sent. |
Message | The body of the email or a summary of it, depending on how much content was stored in the log. |
Status | The delivery outcome recorded by the mail-sending system. Common values are "sent" and "failed". The exact vocabulary depends on the email provider configured in IT Settings. |
Sent At | The date and time the platform submitted the email to the mail server, formatted in your locale and timezone. This is when DPMS sent the message, not necessarily when the recipient's mail client received it. |
How this connects to the rest of DPMS
The Email Logs screen is the downstream record of activity that originates in the Workflow Editor. Every workflow that contains an email action step will write a row here each time it fires. If your log is empty, it almost always means either no workflows with email steps have been configured yet, or those workflows have not yet been triggered.
There is one important outbound link from this screen: clicking any Workflow Name link takes you to /workflow/editor/:id — the Workflow Editor for that specific workflow. This is the fastest path from a log entry back to the configuration that produced it. Note that you'll need the appropriate workflow access to view or edit the workflow once you arrive there; the Workflow Editor enforces its own permissions.
This screen is also indirectly linked to your Email Settings configuration (also in IT Settings). If your SMTP or email provider is not correctly set up, send attempts will fail, and those failures will show up here in the Status column. If you see a sudden wave of failure statuses, checking your email provider configuration is a good first step.
After reviewing this screen, the natural next step is usually the Workflow Editor (to adjust a template or trigger rule) or your email provider settings (if delivery failures are widespread).
Tips & common pitfalls
Heads up: There is currently no search bar or date-range filter on this screen. If you are looking for an email sent weeks or months ago, you will need to scroll down through the table to find it. The records load in reverse chronological order (newest first), so older entries require more scrolling.
Tip: When the From column shows something unexpected — like an untranslated key string instead of a readable sender name — this is not a sign that the email failed to send. It simply means the platform's translation file does not have a label for that sender value. The email was still dispatched normally.
- Blank Workflow Name is normal for system emails. Password resets, account alerts, and other built-in platform messages do not originate from a user-defined workflow and will always show a blank Workflow Name cell with no link.
- Deleted workflows leave permanent log entries. If a workflow is removed after it has already sent emails, the log entries remain with the old workflow name displayed. Clicking the link will lead to a not-found page in the Workflow Editor — that is expected, not a data error.
- Status vocabulary may vary across providers. If your organisation has switched email providers since DPMS was set up, older log entries may use different status strings than newer ones. Both are valid; they just reflect what different mail drivers report.
- Infinite scroll means no page numbers. There is no "Jump to page" control or a total record count displayed. Plan extra time if you need to browse far back in history.
- Entries cannot be deleted or modified. The log is permanent and read-only by design. This is intentional — it protects the integrity of the audit trail.