What does the Attempted status mean?

This article explains the Attempted status, why receiving servers defer mail, and what you can do while Emailit keeps retrying.

Symptoms

• An email shows Attempted in Email API›Emails, with the tooltip “Delivery attempted but resulted in a temporary failure”.
• The Deliveries tab lists one or more attempts with a 4xx reply, such as 421 4.7.0 Try again later or 451 4.7.1 Greylisted.
• Your webhook receives email.attempted events with smtp_code, smtp_enhanced_code and smtp_response.

Cause

The recipient’s mail server answered with a temporary error, or didn’t answer at all. Common reasons:

• Greylisting. Some servers reject the first attempt from an unknown sender on purpose and accept the retry.
• Rate limiting by the provider. Large mailbox providers defer mail when a sender’s volume jumps or its reputation is new. This is common while you warm up.
• Temporary problems on their side, such as maintenance, a full queue or a DNS timeout.
• Connection errors or timeouts reaching the recipient’s server.

Emailit retries automatically, up to 7 attempts with growing gaps: 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320 and 640 minutes, about 21 hours in total. The status stays Attempted until one of these happens:

• An attempt succeeds and the status changes to Delivered.
• The server gives a permanent 5xx refusal and the status changes to Bounced.
• All 7 attempts fail. The email is marked Bounced with Maximum number of delivery attempts (7) has been reached, and the address is added to your suppression list.

Some replies that look temporary, such as “mailbox full” or “account disabled”, are treated as permanent because retrying won’t help.

Fix

1. Read the reply. Open the email and check the Deliveries tab. The receiving server’s reply usually names the reason. Look up the code in SMTP reply codes and enhanced status codes.

2. Wait for the retries. Most greylisting and throttling clears on the first or second retry. You don’t need to resend, and resending creates a duplicate.

3. Look for a pattern. If many emails to one provider are Attempted, slow down your sending to that provider and check your authentication and sending health. Throttling is often a reputation signal.

4. Cancel if you no longer want it sent. Select Cancel delivery on the email page to stop the remaining retries. An attempt that’s already in progress may still complete.

5. After a final bounce, decide whether to resend. Fix the cause, remove the address from suppressions if it’s valid, and then use Retry to send a new copy.

For the difference between temporary and permanent failures, see What’s the difference between a hard and a soft bounce?.

Still stuck?

If one provider defers all your mail for hours, contact support or ask in Discord with a few email IDs and the replies from the Deliveries tab.