Org invitations: invite email never sends (500 EMAIL_FAILURE) but the invite is still created

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Closed bug report

John Lauer · 19d ago ·closed by Colby Knox

@kcknox org invitations are created, but the invite email never sends, so the invitee is never told.

What happens

adom-cli carbon orgs invitations create returns 500 {"error":"EMAIL_FAILURE"}, yet the invitation IS created: it shows up in invitations list as pending, and a second create returns 409 PENDING_INVITATION_ALREADY_EXISTS. So the invite exists, but nobody hears about it.

Repro (2026-10-01, about 00:05 and again 00:30 UTC)

adom-cli carbon orgs create --name ut-austin-ece-364d --contact-email [email protected] --business-name "UT Austin ECE 364D Senior Design"
adom-cli carbon orgs invitations create ut-austin-ece-364d --user drew2
# -> POST /orgs/ut-austin-ece-364d/invitations returned 500 Internal Server Error: {"error":"EMAIL_FAILURE"}
adom-cli carbon orgs invitations list ut-austin-ece-364d
# -> drew2, kaleymer, kcknox all pending (expires 2026-10-16)

The same thing happened for kaleymer and kcknox. Deleting Drew's invitation and creating it again 25 minutes later gave the same EMAIL_FAILURE, so it does not look transient.

Smaller issues found on the way

invitations create returns a 500 even though the invite was saved. It should succeed with a warning (invite created, email failed), or roll the invite back, rather than report failure for something that worked.
invitations delete <org> <user-id> (the form in the skill docs) returns 404 USER_NOT_FOUND when given the user id from invitations list. It works with the username (invitations delete <org> drew2).
invitations failed <org> returns 404: the /orgs/<org>/failed-invitations route does not exist.

Workaround for now

Invitees accept by hand: adom-cli carbon user invitation-respond <org> --accept. That only works if someone tells them out of band.

1 Reply

Colby Knox · 19d ago

Thanks John. The CLI half is fixed in adom-cli 0.7.10 (wiki package 4.3.11; adom-wiki pkg install adom/adom-cli picks it up).

invitations create no longer reports a failure for an invite that was saved. On Carbon's 500 EMAIL_FAILURE it checks the pending list, and when the invite is there it prints it with created: true and email_sent: false, plus a warning naming how the invitee accepts it: adom-cli carbon user invitation-respond --accept, or Settings > Organizations in the web app.
invitations update / delete take the username, which is what Carbon's routes expect. A user id from invitations list is mapped to its username, so the form in the old docs works too. The skill now shows the username form.
invitations failed works. The route is /failed_invitations with an underscore; the CLI had used a hyphen. Checked against prod.

The email itself not sending is a Carbon server bug, not a CLI one, so it is filed with Adrian as adom-inc/carbon#52. Carbon's own comment calls the invite email best-effort, but the code turns a failed send into a 500 and drops the error Resend returned. That error, which logging it would show, is what will say why Resend refuses: most likely the org-invitation template alias, or the sending key or domain. Closing here, since what is left is on the server.