Message statuses

Status	Meaning	Credit
queued	Accepted and waiting for the sender	reserved
sending	The sender is rendering it and talking to the provider	reserved
sent	The provider accepted it	used
delivered	The provider confirmed delivery to the recipient’s server (needs webhooks)	used
bounced	The recipient’s server rejected it; hard bounces add the address to the suppression list	used
complained	The recipient marked it as spam; the address is suppressed	used
failed	Permanent error, or transient errors exhausted all retries	refunded (not when a custom SMTP server may already have received the message, or when an unusually high share of the organization’s sends fails)
held	Waiting for credits in the hold queue	none yet
held_service_error	Waiting for a broken service to be fixed	refunded, reserved again on release
discarded	Removed from the hold queue – the hold duration ran out or someone discarded it manually	none

The API returns queued or held when you send. Everything else you see via getStatus() / GET /v1/messages/:id, History, or the Node SDK’s history().

Typical flows

queued → sending → sent → delivered
queued → sending → sent → bounced
queued → sending → (retry …) → sent
queued → sending → (failover to fallback service) → sent
queued → sending → failed
held → (credits added) → queued → sending → sent
held → (hold duration over) → discarded
queued → sending → (auth error, no fallback) → held_service_error → (service fixed) → queued → …

Timeline events

Each message has a timeline of events with timestamps. The dashboard’s History detail shows them with these labels:

Event	Label in History	Meaning
`held`	Held	Stored in the hold queue
`released`	Released	Released from the hold queue
`queued`	Queued	Waiting for the sender
`sending`	Sending	Handed to the provider
`sent`	Sent	The provider accepted it
`failover`	Switched to fallback service	The primary service failed, the fallback was used
`retry`	Retry scheduled	A transient error, another attempt follows
`auto_reply`	Auto-reply created	An auto-reply was created for this message
`delivered`	Delivered	Delivery confirmed via webhook
`bounced`	Bounced	Hard bounce (status `bounced`) or soft bounce (event only, the provider keeps retrying)
`complained`	Marked as spam	The recipient complained
`opened` / `clicked`	Opened / Link clicked	Open and click tracking from the provider
`failed`	Failed	Permanent error
`refunded`	Credit refunded	The reserved credit went back to its grant
`discarded`	Discarded	Removed from the hold queue

opened and clicked are events, not statuses – a delivered message that was opened stays delivered. Open tracking depends on the provider and on the recipient loading images, so treat it as an estimate.

Retention

Messages and their rendered content are kept for the history period of the plan they were sent on (7 to 180 days, see Plans), then deleted.