Delivery delays & retries
You sent a message and it hasn't arrived yet. Before assuming something failed: most delays are the receiving server asking Bird to come back later, and Bird doing exactly that. This page explains what happens between "sent" and "delivered", and where to watch it happen.
How delivery actually works
When Bird sends your email, it hands the message to the recipient's mail server — Gmail, Outlook, a company mail server — and that server decides what to do with it. Three things can happen:
- It accepts the message. That's a delivery: the receiving server has taken responsibility for getting it to the mailbox.
- It defers the message — "try again later". The mailbox might be full, the server busy, or the provider deliberately slowing down mail from senders it doesn't know well yet (a common, harmless practice called greylisting). This is a soft bounce, and it's temporary by definition.
- It refuses the message permanently. That's a hard bounce — covered in Why did my email bounce?.
The important one for delays is the middle case: deferrals are normal, and Bird retries them automatically on a schedule. Most deferred messages are accepted on a later attempt without you doing anything. A message can defer more than once before it lands — each retry is just Bird patiently knocking again.
What the statuses mean
As a message moves through this process, each recipient's status tells you where things stand:
- Accepted / queued — Bird has your message and is preparing it for delivery. This is the starting state of every send.
- Deferred / retrying — Bird attempted delivery and the receiving server asked it to try again later. Not a failure: Bird is retrying, and the recipient will end up either delivered or bounced.
- Delivered — the receiving server accepted the message and took responsibility for it.
One nuance about delivered: it means the recipient's mail server accepted the message, which is as far as any sender can see. Where the message lands inside the mailbox — inbox, promotions tab, spam folder — is the receiving provider's decision and isn't reported back. If messages are delivering but not being seen, that's a deliverability question (sender reputation, authentication, content), not a delivery delay.
A delay is not a failure
The key reassurance: a message sitting in deferred/retrying has not failed and doesn't need to be resent. Resending while Bird is still retrying just risks the recipient getting it twice. Only if every retry is exhausted does the recipient end as bounced — and at that point you'll see it clearly, with the receiving server's reason attached.
Transient delays of minutes — occasionally longer when a receiving server is greylisting or having a bad day — are a normal part of email between any two servers on the internet.
Where to watch a message's progress
Open the message's detail view in the dashboard. Each recipient has its own timeline of events: when the message was accepted, when it was queued, each delivery attempt and deferral with the receiving server's response, and the final delivery. So instead of wondering whether anything is happening, you can watch the retry cycle directly and see exactly what the other side said each time.
If you'd rather be notified than watch, your systems can receive these same per-recipient events as webhooks — the events developer guide documents the full event vocabulary, including the deferred and delivered events this page describes.
Related pages
- Why did my email bounce? — what happens when retries run out, and hard vs soft bounces
- Email events reference — the developer guide to every event in a recipient's timeline