What does 'Mailing Error Code = 26' indicate?

Environment:

Feedback, Outreach, RNMD, All Versions

Issue:

Surveys are not being sent to end-users.

Resolution:

This particular error code indicates that no audience has been defined for the mailing that was executed.

A mailing or survey can be triggered in different ways using different types of audiences, i.e. transactional, recurring, broadcast, reminders, etc.  The audience calculation can be dependent on various criteria that can include or exclude the contact from the mailing or survey.  A few examples why the contacts may be excluded from the audience may be due to the customer opting out of this type of mailing, their email address has been invalidated, they already received the mailing previously, the recency or frequency settings for the contacts in the audience, etc.  This is not an all-inclusive list since it depends on the mailing configuration and various dependencies. 

When contacts are excluded from the audience leaving no contacts left to be sent an email, the end result would be this mailing error (Mailing Error Code = 26).  This does not mean there was an error with the mailing but there was no audience to send the emails for the mailing.

As a side note, in the event the survey/mailing is triggered by a rule with a delay, the mail will populate the Mailing Delivery Queue report (ID 2009), however it will result in the mailing error code when it attempts to send.