Deferred status is here, giving you more detailed bounce information

We’ve updated email bounces with a new status to give you a more accurate view of your email activity—Starter plans and above can now see Deferred emails. 

When an email deferral occurs, our system automatically reattempts delivery for a set number of retries. This means that during the retry period, the message is in a kind of limbo—not bounced and not delivered either, but rather delayed until the issue preventing delivery is resolved. 

To give you a more accurate representation of where each email is at, and to provide more detailed information about bounce reasons, we’ve introduced the Deferred status.

What does it mean if an email is deferred?

If an email shows as deferred, it means delivery of the message has been delayed and is in the process of retrying. Retries will continue until the message is delivered, or until the retry window ends and the message is permanently soft or hard bounced. 

Instead of seeing an immediate soft bounce in email activity, users with a Starter plan and above will first see their message with the Deferred status.

More insights for troubleshooting

As well as getting a more accurate look at the status of an email, you’ll also be able to view the SMTP errors and messages indicating the reason for the bounce. This enables you to troubleshoot DNS/authentication issues or identify repeated deferral patterns. 

Most of the time, deferrals will resolve on their own, but occasionally, the cause can point to issues on the sender’s side, so these extra insights are useful for ruling out any configuration issues with SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, or high sending rates.

Deferred status is available now

You can now view deferred emails in your Activity dashboard, apply the activity.deferred event to your webhooks, and integrate this data into your workflows. 

To learn more about deferrals, and the common deferral reasons and error codes, check out our help guide, What are deferred bounces.