Status icons on the email history tab: what they look like and what they mean.

When viewing the email history tab of a subscriber's profile, you'll notice a colored icon next to each email they've been sent:

This icon indicates the status of that email, for that subscriber. You can hover over the icon for additional details:

Let's go over what each status means!

If an email has a status of 'Sent', it means we sent it, but the recipient's email provider hasn't sent us confirmation that they accepted it yet.

☝️ Please note this almost never means the email failed to deliver to the subscriber. In some cases, the recipient's host will send this confirmation after a delay. In an exceptionally few cases, we never receive it—and this is almost never a problem!

If you see this status on its own, it's typically no reason to worry. Chances are, the email was delivered just fine. But if you're seeing this status and hearing from your subscriber that they never received it (including in their spam folder), let us know and we can help dig deeper.

The 'Delivered' status means that the recipient's email provider accepted the email. From there, Kit no longer has control over it—it's now up to their email provider to place that email where they see fit, such as in the inbox or spam folder.

For tips on how to improve your inbox placement, the following guides & best practices come straight from our deliverability team and are a great place to start:

This status means the email was delivered, and we detected that the subscriber opened it.

Email opens are tracked by the standard method of including an invisible 1-pixel tracking image that loads when the email itself is opened.

This status means the email was delivered, and we detected that the subscriber clicked a link inside of it. Clicks will also trigger the email to be detected as opened in situations where our open-tracking image wasn't able to load.

Some subscribers may have strict security settings on their domain, where a spam filter automatically opens emails and clicks the links to be sure they're safe before placing the message in the user's inbox. This is more common with organizational and business email addresses, and it can cause false positives when it comes to open and click tracking. If you suspect this may be the case for some of your subscribers, we have more information and some steps you can take to help mitigate it here.

If an email is marked as bounced, it means our mailing servers tried several times to send the email to the subscriber's inbox without success.

There are two types of bounces: hard bounces are permanent issues (like the email address not existing), and soft bounces which are temporary issues (like the subscriber's inbox being full).

You can tell the difference because hard bounces will cause the subscriber to get the 'Bounced' status on your list, whereas if a soft bounce occurs, the subscriber will remain 'Confirmed' on your list and the bounce will just be indicated for the individual email itself (via the status icon shown above).

In some cases, you might see a slightly different ‘Bounced’ icon that has a green circle in it:

This icon indicates that at least one link in the email was clicked (by the automated click system of the recipient’s email provider, for example) before the email was bounced.

In more technical terms, the bounce that happened here is called an 'asynchronous bounce.' But regardless of whether the ‘Bounced’ icon has a green circle in it, our mailing servers were ultimately unable to deliver the email to the recipient and you should treat the situation as such.

For more information about bounced emails and/or subscribers, check out our dedicated guide here.

This status means there were several attempts to deliver an email, but something went wrong and delivery failed. If you see this status for an email, please reach out to our team and we can help help dig deeper into what might have caused the failure.

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