From the Trenches: How to fix missing Docusign email notifications for recipients

Suppose you sent the envelope to the recipient, but the recipient comes back to you and says, "I haven’t got the email notification for signing” or “I didn’t get the completion email." Then what should you do? This post illustrates what you need to check when this happens. 

Sender

As a sender of the envelope, you should check the below items.

1. The envelope is in a draft status: If the envelope's status is not set as sent, it won’t be sent to the recipients, but stays in your Drafts folder. To check whether it is in draft status, log in to Docusign and navigate to Agreements > Show More > Drafts. If you can find the envelope in this folder, the envelope hasn’t been sent to the recipient. Or you can call the Envelopes: get API to check the status of the envelope. To avoid this issue in the future, check your code and make sure that the value of the status property is set as sent. The default value for the status property is created, which means the envelope will be saved as a draft. 

2. Embedded signing:  The email notification won’t be sent to the recipient if the envelope is created for embedded signing. So it’s worth checking whether your code designates the envelope for embedded signing. Embedded signing is set by defining the clientUserId property under the recipients object, like this:

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   "recipients": {
       "signers": [
           {
               "routingOrder": 1,
               "name": "[NAME]",
               "email": "[EMAIL]",
               "clientUserId": "[CLIENT_USER_ID]",
               "recipientId": "1"
           }
       ]
   }

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   The presence of the clientUserId property specifies that the recipient will be an embedded signer. Therefore, if you want to send the email notification to the recipient, you would need to either adopt remote signing (removing the clientUserId property designates the envelope for remote signing) or use hybrid signing instead of embedded signing.

3. Envelope Delivery settings: While embedded recipients don’t get an email notification to sign your envelopes, they normally get notification that the envelope has been completed. If your embedded recipients aren’t getting completion notification emails,  check your sending account’s Envelope Delivery settings. In your Docusign account, you can find these under Admin > Signing Settings > Envelope Delivery. Among the list under the Envelope Delivery, the two options below affect how the email notification is sent to the embedded signer: Suppress emails to embedded signers Send completion emails to embedded signers Check these options and make sure that Send completion emails to embedded signers is enabled and Suppress emails to embedded signers is not enabled. Note: Suppress emails to embedded signers has higher priority than Send completion emails to embedded signers; the completion email won’t be sent if the Suppress emails to embedded signers is enabled.

Recipient

As a recipient of the envelope, you should log in to your Docusign account, select your profile, and check My Preferences > Notifications > Recipient Notifications. Verify that I have an envelope to sign is checked; if not, you won’t receive an email notification. If you don’t have a Docusign account, contact the sender of the envelope for further assistance.

Further reading

These articles cover the general causes of the email notification issue, and I recommend you read these if the steps above don’t resolve yours:

• Why aren't my signers receiving Docusign Notification emails?

• Why am I not getting Docusign email notifications?

If the issue still persists, I recommend you visit our Contact Support Page and create a case for further assistance.

Additional resources

• Docusign Developer Center

• Docusign Developers Community

• @DocusignDevs on X

• Docusign for Developers on LinkedIn

• Docusign for Developers on YouTube

• Docusign Developer Newsletter