The issue
The new dropped recipients behavior is a sensible safeguard, and I appreciate that the drop reason is now shown in the conversation. The problem is that this is the only signal. A dropped recipient is surfaced passively — a red icon, red text, and a hover tooltip inside the conversation stream — and nothing else happens:
- No notification or alert to the sender, the assignee, or the team.
- No attribute set on the contact or the conversation to flag that a drop occurred.
- The conversation is not reopened, or moved to any view.
- No event/webhook we can hook automation onto.
So unless someone happens to reopen that exact conversation and read the recipient line, the failure is invisible.
Why this matters for us
These are not marketing emails. We use Intercom for account and support communication — replies to tickets, account notices, security- and billing-related messages. When one of these silently drops, the customer simply never hears back from us.
In practice we only find out one of two ways:
- By chance, if an agent happens to revisit the conversation and notices the red recipient.
- When the customer contacts us again asking why we went quiet.
Both mean a real delay in getting an important message to the person, and a worse experience for a customer who did nothing wrong (e.g. a temporary "mailbox full" suppression, a bounce that's since been resolved, or a domain block).
The frustrating part is that we usually can still reach these people — through chat, or via an alternative contact email on the account — but only if we know the drop happened. Right now we don't.
What we'd like to see
Any one of these would help; together they'd close the gap completely:
- Automatically reopen the conversation when an outbound reply is fully dropped, so it returns to a human instead of sitting closed with an undelivered message.
- A notification when a drop occurs — to the sending admin and/or the conversation assignee, and ideally configurable at the team/workspace level so it can route to a shared inbox or channel.
- A contact and/or conversation attribute set on drop (with the drop reason). An attribute would let us build:
- Filtered inbox views / segments of "messages that didn't deliver"
- Workflows that reopen, reassign, or tag the conversation automatically
- Reporting on how often this happens and for which reasons
- (Nice to have) A retry action once the underlying issue is resolved, instead of having to compose and send a brand-new message.