When you send an email through, there are a few different email events that can be attained:

Delivered – your email has been delivered to the receiving server.

• Processed – essentially a ‘completed’ status on our end; your message is good to go.

• Dropped – generally this is when an email is stopped from our end. There are several reasons why we would drop an email, read on to find out more.

• Deferred – the receiving email server has delayed delivery of the message.

• Bounce – the receiving email server has refused delivery of the message.

Delivered

It’s common for email marketers to expect a ‘delivered’ status to mean that an email message has reached the inbox of the recipient. However, this status simply means that the email has been delivered to recipient server, not necessarily to recipient’s inbox. From there, the server has the option of delivering the message to the recipient’s inbox or sending it to the junk/spam folder. On the rare occasion, the email server can choose to delete or ‘drop’ the email, meaning it is not even visible in the spam/junk folders.

When the receiving server makes these decisions, they are purely based on the reputation of the sending server and the email content. Senders that have cultivated a ‘spammy’ reputation (through receiving high numbers of spam complaints) or are sending content that raises red flags about the propensity to generate spam complaints, are less likely to reach the email inbox of the recipient.

Processed

This is a temporary state while we prepare to send the message. Generally most messages will be at the processed status for a minute or two, if not less. It’s simply what happens when a new email job is created, the message has been received by us and is ready for sending.

Dropped

A dropped email event can occur when an email platform identifies spam content and removes the offending message before it reaches the recipient server, to protect sender reputation. There are other reasons that an email might be dropped by ClickSend, including when a subscriber has already unsubscribed or bounced previously, invalid SMTPAPI header or recipient list over package quota.

Deferred

There are several reasons why an email might be met with a deferred status. A deferral is where the email is temporarily unable to be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the receiving email server has seen high volumes of emails in a short amount of time and suspects that the sender could be spammy. By deferring, or throttling, the emails the receiving server can prevent email inundation while investigating whether these messages are spam. Other reasons that the email may be deferred is that the recipient mailbox may have reached capacity or technical issues with the receiving server. When this occurs, we attempt to send the message for up to 72 hours, before it becomes a soft bounce.

Bounced

When an email bounces, it means that it was unable to be delivered. There are many reasons why an email might bounce; these can be categorized into hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are when emails cannot be delivered for permanent reasons: the email address does not exist or is incorrect. Soft bounces occur when a mailbox might be full or server offline – while attempting to deliver, these messages they will have a status of deferred, until 72 hours have passed and the email has not been delivered. A soft bounce may also be given a status of ‘blocked’ on some email platforms.

It’s important to ensure your bounce rate (especially hard bounces) remains low to maintain your sender reputation and ability to send bulk emails.