Email Delivered BEFORE Email Sent?

[cteixeira]

In leads activity logs, I've noticed that often times the Email Delivered Activity occurs a few seconds BEFORE the Email Sent Activity. This has been causing issues with our Analytics team in Tableau since they would expect to see Sent before Delivered. Does anyone have an explanation for why this would happen?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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Does anyone have an explanation for why this would happen?

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Sent really means “considered for sending” — or at best “queued for sending” — rather than actually put on the wire. But it’s logged at some point after the event (even if it’s 10 milliseconds after).

While Delivered is a signal direct from the SMTP infrastructure that something was accepted by the remote mailserver, also after the event.

You shouldn’t have too many instances of this out-of-order situation but it’s possible given that multiple systems are feeding into the Activity Log.

Either way, it should never be confusing from the analytics standpoint because you should be reassembling based on the Campaign Run ID!

[cteixeira]

Thanks for the reply Sandford! Much appreciated!