Exposing Email Cron Errors and Adding Real‑Time Observability to the VS API

TL;DR:

I refactored the email cron to stop swallowing SMTP/Brevo failures and to surface them through our observability layer. The change adds a scoped error reporter, propagates failures to the cron‑trigger controller, and ships a new test suite that guarantees errors aren’t hidden again.

The Problem

Our nightly runEmailCron() job ( apps/api/src/email/email.cron.ts ) was designed to send a batch of reminder emails. When the underlying SMTP provider (Brevo) rejected a message, the sendMail() helper caught the exception and silently marked the notification as sent. The symptom was a growing backlog of undelivered emails with no trace in logs:

ERROR: Cron job "email" completed successfully

Even worse, the cron-trigger.controller (apps/api/src/cron/cron-trigger.controller.ts) considered the job successful because the caught error never bubbled up. This made debugging impossible and left our stakeholders unaware of delivery issues.

What I Tried First

The initial implementation (pre‑fix) looked like this:

// email.service.ts (original) export async function sendMail(to: string, html: string) { try { await transporter.sendMail({ to, html }); } catch (e) { // Swallow the error – we don’t want the cron to crash logger.warn('Email delivery failed, marking as sent'); return; } }

I kept the try/catch because I feared the cron would abort and block other unrelated jobs. The idea was “fail fast, but keep the pipeline moving”. Unfortunately, the catch block never logged the real error and the calling cron kept counting the email as delivered.

The Implementation

1. Introduce a Scoped Error Reporter

We already have an observability module (apps/api/src/common/observability.ts) that forwards errors to Sentry/Datadog. I added a mail‑specific scope so we can filter and aggregate email failures separately.

// apps/api/src/email/email.service.ts import { AsyncLocalStorage } from "node:async_hooks"; import { reportError } from "../common/observability.js"; export const mailFailureScope = new AsyncLocalStorage<string>(); export async function sendMail(to: string, html: string) { try { await transporter.sendMail({ to, html }); } catch (err) { // Attach the current scope (e.g., cron run id) for better tracing const scope = mailFailureScope.getStore() ?? "unknown"; reportError(err, { scope, to }); // Re‑throw so the caller knows the job failed throw err; } }

Why AsyncLocalStorage? It propagates a request‑level identifier (cronRunId) across async boundaries without manually threading it through every function.

2. Wire the Scope into the Cron 

// apps/api/src/email/email.cron.ts import { sendCondoFeeReminder, sendCondoFeeOverdue, // … mailFailureScope, } from "./email.service.js"; import { reportError } from "../common/observability.js"; export async function runEmailCron() { const runId = `email-${Date.now()}`; // Store the runId for the whole execution return mailFailureScope.run(runId, async () => { try { await Promise.all([ sendCondoFeeReminder(), sendCondoFeeOverdue(), // other email jobs… ]); } catch (e) { // The error is already reported by sendMail; just surface it reportError(e, { runId, job: "emailCron" }); // Propagate to the controller throw e; } }); }

Now any failure inside sendMail automatically carries the runId, and the cron itself re‑throws the error after reporting.

3. Make the Cron‑Trigger Controller Respect Failures 

// apps/api/src/cron/cron-trigger.controller.ts async function runJob( job: string, fn: () => Promise<unknown> ): Promise<JobResult> { try { const res = await fn(); // If the job returns a falsy value we still consider it success return { job, status: "ok", result: res }; } catch (err) { // Previously we ignored the error and returned ok // Now we mark the job as failed return { job, status: "error", error: err.message }; } }

The controller now returns status: "error" when any job throws, which propagates to the GitHub Actions workflow.

4. Add a Test Suite to Guard Against Silent Failures 

// apps/api/src/__tests__/email.cron.errores.test.ts import { runEmailCron } from "../../email/email.cron.js"; import { sendMail } from "../../email/email.service.js"; jest.mock("../../email/email.service", () => ({ sendMail: jest.fn(), })); test("runEmailCron propagates SMTP errors", async () => { // Force sendMail to reject (sendMail as jest.Mock).mockRejectedValue(new Error("SMTP 550")); await expect(runEmailCron()).rejects.toThrow("SMTP 550"); });

The test guarantees that if sendMail throws, the cron does not swallow it.

5. Update the GitHub Actions Workflow 

# .github/workflows/cron-diario.yml name: ⏰ Cron diario — API PlayaMXCRM on: schedule: - cron: "7 7 * * *" # 07:07 UTC, compensates GitHub delay jobs: run-daily: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v3 - name: Run API cron jobs run: | npm ci npm run start:cron # invokes cron-trigger.controller

Running the jobs via GitHub Actions ensures the API container (Render free tier) wakes up, executes the cron, and exits with a non‑zero code if any job fails. This gives us immediate feedback in the Actions UI.

Key Takeaway

Never swallow errors in background jobs. Use a scoped observability helper (AsyncLocalStorage + reportError) to surface failures, and let the orchestrator (cron‑trigger controller) treat thrown errors as job failures. This pattern gives you real‑time alerts, reliable test coverage, and a clean separation between “job ran” and “job succeeded”.

What's Next

  1. Alerting: Hook reportError into PagerDuty so a failed email batch triggers an on‑call incident.
  2. Retry Logic: Implement exponential back‑off retries inside sendMail for transient SMTP errors.
  3. Metrics: Emit a Prometheus counter (email_cron_success_total, email_cron_failure_total) for dashboards.
  4. Feature Flag: Wrap the new error‑exposing behavior behind a flag to roll out gradually in production.

Roberto Luna Osorio – Full Stack Developer & Project Lead

Playa del Carmen, México

vibecoding #buildinpublic #nodejs #typescript #cron #observability #github-actions

Part of my Build in Public series — sharing the real process of building Building PlayaMXCRM from Playa del Carmen, México.

Repo: zaerohell/VS · 2026-10-09

#playadev #buildinpublic