The Deferred status indicates that a delivery attempt for the email failed temporarily. The message has not been permanently refused — the system can make new attempts. This article explains what this status means and what you can do.
What it's used for
Understanding the Deferred status allows you to:
- Know whether any action is required on your part
- Distinguish a temporary issue from a permanent one
- Anticipate whether the message is likely to be delivered
How it works
When a message has a Deferred status, it means the receiving server was unable to accept the message at the time of the delivery attempt, for a temporary reason. The Deferred status can evolve to Delivered if a subsequent attempt succeeds, or to Soft bounce or Hard bounce if attempts fail repeatedly.
Possible causes of a Deferred status
The following situations can result in a Deferred status:
- The recipient's mail server is momentarily unavailable or overloaded
- The recipient's inbox is full
- The receiving server imposes temporary limits on the number of messages it accepts
- Some email providers intentionally slow down the reception of messages from the same sender
- Some mail servers apply greylisting — an anti-spam technique that temporarily refuses messages from an unknown sender to force a retry. In this case, the system will automatically retry and the message is generally delivered successfully on a subsequent attempt
What to do if a message is in Deferred status
Hover over the Deferred status label in the Activity tab to display the reason for the issue directly in the list.
In most cases, no action is required. The system will automatically attempt to deliver the message again.
If multiple messages remain in Deferred status persistently, verify that your DKIM 1, DKIM 2, and SPF/Return-Path (MX) records display a Valid status (green circle) in the Domains tab. Without these three valid records, your sends will be blocked. Also check your DMARC record: although its absence does not block sending, an invalid or missing DMARC can lead some recipient servers to reject or filter your messages as spam.
See also