Scoutinternal

BitGo Email Notification Delivery Issues

BitGo Email Notification Delivery Issues

Problem

Customers report not receiving expected email notifications from BitGo. This includes transaction notifications (sends/receives), staking reward notifications, low-fee-address alerts, login/verification emails, and other system-generated messages. The issue can stem from multiple causes: platform-side outages affecting email delivery infrastructure, the customer's email provider blocking or filtering BitGo messages, BitGo engineering intentionally disabling notifications for certain user tiers, excessive notification volume from automated triggers, or the customer emailing an incorrect/non-existent BitGo address. These issues span all coin types and affect both enterprise and retail users.

Diagnostics

  • Confirm the user tier: Determine whether the customer is a Retail (self-service) user or an Enterprise/Institutional user. Transaction email notifications have been intentionally disabled for Retail users by engineering (no ETA for re-enablement).
  • Check the BitGo status page: Visit https://status.bitgo.com/ for any active or recent incidents involving email delivery. Prior outages (e.g., https://status.bitgo.com/incidents/9mftr0t3dz8l) have caused temporary email delivery failures.
  • Verify the customer's email address in the admin system: Confirm the account is active and the email on file is correct. Check whether the user account has been set to inactive (which can block emails including password reset).
  • Check email bounce/block status: Determine whether the customer's email address has been blocked or bounced on BitGo's sending infrastructure. If so, perform an unblock on the address.
  • Ask the customer to whitelist @bitgo.com: The customer's mail server or spam filter may be rejecting BitGo emails. Ask them to whitelist the @bitgo.com domain.
  • Confirm notification settings in the UI: In the BitGo web app, verify whether the customer has email notifications enabled under their notification/settings preferences. Currently, the UI only exposes toggles for withdrawal and deposit notifications.
  • For excessive notifications: Check whether the customer has a low-balance fee address triggering per-transaction alerts, or a script generating high transaction volume on testnet.
  • For bounce-back / "address not found" errors: Check which BitGo email address the customer attempted to contact. customerservice@bitgo.com does not exist. Valid addresses include support@bitgo.com, ftxcreditors@bitgo.com, and others.

Resolution

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#retail-notifications-disabled

Trigger: A Retail (non-enterprise) user reports they stopped receiving transaction email notifications, and no platform outage is active.

Signals: retail user, no transaction email, notifications stopped, no email notification

Steps:

  1. Confirm the customer is a Retail user (not associated with an enterprise).
  2. Inform the customer that BitGo engineering has disabled email notifications for transactions for Retail users.
  3. Explain there is no ETA on when these will be re-enabled.
  4. Advise that it is not possible to retrigger missed email notifications.
  5. If the customer has webhooks configured, suggest using webhooks as an alternative. Webhooks can be retriggered via the UI or the API.

Notes: This applies specifically to transaction notifications for Retail users. Enterprise users are not affected by this change. Webhooks remain functional regardless.

"Our engineering team report email notifications for transactions have been disabled for Retail users. We are reviewing this in the long term to determine a better solution, but have no ETA on when these will be re-enabled once more." (ticket #45341)

"Just want to set the expectation it is not possible to retrigger these emails. If your wallet had webhooks setup, you can retrigger the webhooks via the UI or the API." (ticket #45341)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#platform-outage

Trigger: Multiple customers report missing email notifications around the same timeframe, and the BitGo status page shows an active or recent incident.

Signals: outage, email delivery error, status page, incident, multiple customers affected, emails stopped for all transactions

Steps:

  1. Check the BitGo status page at https://status.bitgo.com/ for any active or recently resolved incidents related to email delivery.
  2. Share the relevant incident link with the customer (e.g., https://status.bitgo.com/incidents/9mftr0t3dz8l).
  3. Ask the customer to verify whether email delivery has resumed after the incident was marked resolved.
  4. If the issue persists after the incident is resolved, escalate to engineering.

Notes: Prior incidents have caused temporary system-wide email delivery failures. Once resolved, notifications typically resume automatically without customer action.

"We experienced an outage with the same issue earlier this morning, but it should be resolved by now. Could you please check if the issue is still occurring? Status Page: https://status.bitgo.com/incidents/9mftr0t3dz8l" (ticket #198236)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#email-blocked-or-filtered

Trigger: An individual customer reports missing email notifications (not a system-wide outage), and the customer's email may be blocked or filtered by their provider or by BitGo's sending infrastructure.

Signals: not receiving emails, no notification, whitelist, unblock, spam filter, blocked email

Steps:

  1. Ask the customer to ensure that @bitgo.com is a whitelisted domain in their email provider or corporate mail gateway.
  2. Perform an unblock on the customer's email address in BitGo's email sending infrastructure to ensure notifications continue to be sent.
  3. Ask the customer to check their spam/junk folder.
  4. If a firewall may be blocking the connection (e.g., corporate environments), ask the customer to try from a different device using a cellular network.
  5. Follow up to confirm whether the issue is resolved.

Notes: This is a common root cause for individual users. The unblock action is performed on BitGo's side. If the customer's corporate email policy blocks external senders, they will need their IT team to whitelist BitGo.

"Can you please ensure that @bitgo.com is a whitelisted domain. We have also performed an unblock on your email address to ensure our email notifications continue to be sent to you." (ticket #45341)

"We do not see any login logs at the moment. Could you please try logging in from a different device using a cellular network? Also, kindly check if there is any firewall blocking the connection." (ticket #271102)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#excessive-low-fee-notifications

Trigger: Customer reports receiving an extremely high volume of notification emails (e.g., 100 per 11 minutes), typically related to low fee address balance on testnet or mainnet.

Signals: excessive emails, too many notifications, 100 emails, low funds, fee address, testnet, notification flood

Steps:

  1. Identify the fee address associated with the customer's wallet that is triggering the low-balance notifications.
  2. As an interim fix, fund the fee address to suppress the low-balance notification trigger.
  3. Escalate to engineering to investigate rate-limiting or throttling for notification emails (e.g., sending only once per day instead of per transaction).
  4. Confirm with the customer that the notification volume has stopped.

Notes: This has occurred on testnet environments where scripts trigger high transaction volume against wallets with low fee balances. Engineering has investigated limiting email frequency (e.g., once daily) but no permanent change has been confirmed in tickets.

"It seems our systems sent an email for every transaction that triggers this error (low funds in fee address) probably you had a script running that triggered all the emails on Friday. They are discussing a better way to handle the notifications, (like sending an email once a day only)." (ticket #207267)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#staking-reward-notifications

Trigger: Customer wants to disable email notifications for staking rewards but cannot find a toggle in the UI for staking-specific notifications.

Signals: staking reward, staking notifications, turn off staking, disable staking email

Steps:

  1. Check whether the customer's BitGo platform version includes the engineering fix that added the ability to disable staking reward notifications. This fix was released around October 2023.
  2. If the fix is available, guide the customer to their notification settings in the UI to disable staking reward notifications.
  3. If the fix is not yet reflected, suggest the customer create an email filter to route staking notification emails to junk/archive as a temporary workaround.
  4. If the toggle is present but not working, escalate to engineering.

Notes: Prior to the fix, the UI only offered toggles for withdrawal and deposit notifications. Trade notifications are also covered by these toggles — disabling deposit/withdrawal notifications will also stop trade notifications.

"Currently there is no way to disable receiving email notifications for staking transactions for now. Our team are looking into functionality enhancement but with no ETA for now." (ticket #315998)

"Just to inform you that our Engineering team has released a fix on this issue." (ticket #315998)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#trade-notification-settings

Trigger: Customer wants to disable email notifications specifically for trade (buy/sell) transactions but only sees withdrawal and deposit toggles in the UI.

Signals: trading emails, trade notification, buy sell email, disable trade email, notification settings

Steps:

  1. Inform the customer that the current notification settings in the UI only offer toggles for withdrawals and deposits.
  2. Explain that these toggles also cover incoming and outgoing trades — disabling them will stop trade notifications as well.
  3. Note that more granular notification controls are planned for the future but no ETA is available.

Notes: Disabling withdrawal/deposit notifications is an all-or-nothing action that will suppress trade notifications too. There is no way to selectively disable only trade notifications at this time.

"At the moment they are the only two settings we have for email notifications. These will also cover incoming and outgoing trades so if you disable them that will stop the notifications. We are aiming to update this feature to have more functionality in the future." (ticket #233447)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#invalid-bitgo-email-address

Trigger: Customer receives a "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)" bounce-back when emailing BitGo, indicating the address does not exist.

Signals: delivery status notification, failure, address not found, customerservice@bitgo.com, bounce back, undelivered mail

Steps:

  1. Check which BitGo email address the customer attempted to reach.
  2. If they emailed customerservice@bitgo.com, inform them that this address does not exist.
  3. Redirect the customer to the correct address:
    • General support: support@bitgo.com
    • FTX creditor inquiries: ftxcreditors@bitgo.com
  4. If the customer's own corporate mail policy is causing the bounce (e.g., blocking outbound messages to certain domains), advise them to contact their IT department.

Notes: Some customers have corporate compliance policies that block certain outbound email types (e.g., messages interpreted as text messages or sent to unrecognized domains). This is on the customer's side, not BitGo's.

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#inactive-user-account

Trigger: Customer cannot receive password reset or verification emails, and the user account is found to be set to inactive in BitGo's system.

Signals: email not recognized, forgot password, inactive account, no reset email, user inactive

Steps:

  1. Look up the user account in the admin system using the email address provided.
  2. Check whether the user account status is set to inactive.
  3. If inactive, set the account to active.
  4. Ask the customer to retry the login or password reset flow.
  5. Confirm the customer receives the expected email.

Notes: This can occur when a new enterprise user account has been provisioned but not yet activated, or if an account was deactivated for other reasons.

"User inactive, set to active" (ticket #256925)

Scenario: notification-notifications-email-delivery#email-change-for-bcp-testing

Trigger: Customer requests a temporary email address change on their account for business continuity plan testing or similar contingency scenarios.

Signals: business continuity, contingency email, temporary email change, BCP testing, email change

Steps:

  1. Inform the customer that changing an account email address requires a verification video call with an authorized user of the enterprise.
  2. Note that changing the email back will also require a separate verification call.
  3. Confirm the exact email change details (from/to) with the customer.
  4. Send the customer the Calendly scheduling link to book the verification call: https://calendly.com/bitgo-client-delivery/videoid
  5. Instruct the customer to have a government-issued photo ID ready during the meeting.
  6. After the video call, complete the email change.
  7. Advise the customer to log in using the new email address with their existing password. If the old password does not work, they should perform a password reset, which will now be sent to the new email.

Notes: After the email change is completed, the customer should log in with the new email and the existing old password. If that fails, a password reset to the new email address should resolve access.

"Changing an account email address will require an verification call with an authorized user of the enterprise. Please note that changing the email back will require a call as well." (ticket #205990)

"Please use the following link to schedule a time to meet with us and verify the request: https://calendly.com/bitgo-client-delivery/videoid" (ticket #205990)

Related