Sent vs Delivered
DELIVERED – Your message has been successfully delivered to the recipient’s handset and we have received a confirmation (delivery receipt) from the carrier that it was delivered to the handset.
SENT – A Sent (Sending) status describes a message that has been sent from our system to the carrier but the carrier has not returned a confirmation of delivery. These confirmations are known as delivery receipts.
Please note that in some cases, it may take some time to for a sent status to change to delivered as this is dependent on notification from the carrier. A Sent status does not confirm the message was delivered nor failed, however in most cases this will update over time to Delivered or Failed. There are a number of reasons a status remains as Sent, the most common reason for Sent status are:
- Phone is disconnect or number no longer in use.
- Phone number active but phone switched off or out of range for an extended period of time and the message cannot be delivered.
- Recipient is experiencing Network problems.
- The message has been successfully sent and delivered however the carrier has not sent us a confirmation of this which is more often the case.
When a message is in Sent status, several carrier dependent retry strategies come into operation.
If there is no response by the end of the retry period the message will become expired and will be marked as Failed.
For more information read article Understanding Delivery Status Of An SMS