Biz-Email DocsDelivery statuses
Reference for reading campaign and per-recipient statuses.
Delivery state is expressed in two layers: the status of the campaign as a whole, and the outcome for each individual recipient. A campaign can finish while some recipients were never sent to, so neither layer alone explains the result.
Campaign statuses
The progress of the campaign as a whole.
| Status | Meaning | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Being edited. Audience, template, and schedule can all be changed | Send or schedule |
| Scheduled | A send time is set. Recipients are not yet determined. Time, audience, and template can still be changed | Sending starts (at or after the scheduled time), the schedule is canceled, or it fails (for example the send limit is exceeded) |
| Canceled | The schedule was canceled before sending started. A terminal state that cannot be edited (it can still be deleted) | — |
| Sending | Recipients are frozen and delivery is in progress. The campaign cannot return to draft | Sent or failed |
| Sent | All delivery processing has finished | — |
| Failed | Sending could not start, or was stopped partway | — |
Recipients are determined when sending starts
A scheduled campaign does not store its recipients. The audience is evaluated at the moment sending actually begins, which is not necessarily the scheduled time — if delivery processing is delayed, evaluation happens that much later.
Changes made between scheduling and the start of sending are handled differently:
- Someone who unsubscribes: if they still match the audience, they are not sent to and are recorded as skipped with the reason unsubscribed. If the campaign targets a segment that filters on subscription status, they drop out of the audience itself and are not recorded
- Someone who no longer matches the audience: not part of the audience at all, and not recorded
Send limits behave differently for scheduled and immediate sends
The demo has a system-wide send limit. For scheduled campaigns, exceeding the limit at send time makes the campaign fail — nothing is sent at all. For an immediate send, the campaign does not fail: it stays a draft and shows an error, so you can narrow the audience and try again.
Sent also covers sending to nobody
At the campaign level, sent means delivery processing finished; it says nothing about how many messages succeeded. A campaign with no matching recipients, or where every recipient was opted out, also ends as sent. Check the per-recipient statuses below to see how many were actually delivered to the provider.
Per-recipient statuses
The outcome for each contact included in the campaign.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Confirmed as a recipient, not sent yet |
| Sent | Accepted by the delivery provider |
| Skipped | Deliberately not sent (see the reasons below) |
| Failed | Sending was attempted but did not succeed within the retry limit |
Why a recipient was skipped
Recipients that were in the audience but not sent to are recorded together with a reason.
The breakdown by reason is not shown on screen yet
The campaign screen currently shows counts per status (sent, excluded, failed, unprocessed — Japanese labels 送信済み / 除外 / 失敗 / 未処理). It does not break skipped recipients down by reason. That is planned as part of reporting.
| Reason | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Unsubscribed | The contact opted out of delivery |
| Suppressed | Delivery is being withheld after a bounce or complaint. The audience preview labels this Suppression |
| Invalid address | The email address was malformed, or the delivery provider rejected it |
| Duplicate | The same address appeared more than once in this campaign |
Skipped is not an error
Unsubscribed and suppressed mean the message was correctly withheld from someone it must not go to. Treat them separately from failed, which means an attempt was made and did not succeed.
What "sent" does not mean
Sent means the delivery provider accepted the message. It does not cover arrival in the inbox, opens, or clicks.
If a message did not arrive, see Email not delivered.
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