Delivery statuses

Every message moves through a lifecycle of statuses, reported by carriers via delivery reports (DLR).

Status table

Status	Description	Final?
pending	Queued, waiting to send	No
sent	Submitted to carrier network	No
ENROUTE	Accepted by carrier, in transit	No
ACCEPTD	Accepted by carrier for delivery	No
DELIVRD	Delivered to recipient’s handset	Yes
UNDELIV	Delivery failed (invalid number, phone off)	Yes
REJECTD	Rejected by carrier (filtered, blacklisted)	Yes
EXPIRED	Delivery timed out	Yes
DELETED	Message deleted on the carrier network	Yes
UNKNOWN	Outcome unknown, including a send whose result was unclear (for example a timeout); a later delivery report can still replace it	No
failed	Rejected by the gateway before routing (usually no route available), or an internal queue failure. Never charged — the portal reports these as Not Billed.	Yes

Typical flows

pending → sent → ENROUTE → DELIVRD      success
pending → UNKNOWN             outcome unclear (may still change)
pending → sent → UNDELIV      bad number / phone off
pending → sent → REJECTD      carrier blocked
pending → sent → EXPIRED      recipient unreachable
pending → failed              no route available / internal error (never charged)

Where statuses appear

Place	Field
Message status	message.status
Message lists	/sms/messages returns raw status; /sms/messages/unified returns lower-case groups delivered, undelivered, pending, expired, not_billed
Delivery webhook	status
Statistics	Aggregated into delivered / undelivered / pending / expired / not_billed

Reconciliation

API messages are never finalized automatically: they can remain sent, ENROUTE or ACCEPTD. Campaign and automation messages are moved to UNDELIV by an hourly job after 3 days with a carrier ID, or 7 days without one (reported as Not Billed). Campaign delivery reports later than 3 days are ignored.

Interpreting statuses

• DELIVRD is the only confirmed handset delivery. sent means the carrier accepted the message, not that the phone received it.
• UNDELIV vs REJECTD: UNDELIV is usually a recipient problem (dead number, phone off for days); REJECTD is a carrier policy decision (content filtering, blacklist) — review your content/sender if it spikes.
• EXPIRED often means the handset was off or out of coverage for the entire validity period.
• Clean your lists: repeatedly UNDELIV numbers should be suppressed — they cost money and hurt your sending reputation.