A pending message is one that we have received no confirmation from the carrier that the message has been delivered or undelivered.

These confirmations are known as delivery receipts. On our platform delivery receipt processing is de-prioritised in favour of out bound messaging and response processing. While they are generally returned within a few minutes, these can take up to an hour after your campaign has been sent to update during busy periods.

If a message still has a pending status after an hour the most common reasons are:

  • Phone out of credit and cannot receive SMS.
  • Phone number active but phone switched off or out of range.
  • Active prepaid account but SIM is not in the phone.
  • Network problems.

When a message is in pending status several carrier dependent retry strategies come into operation.

If there is no response by the end of the retry period the message will become expired and will be marked as soft bounced.

RETRY STRATEGIES

Different carriers have different retry strategies if they cannot deliver a message immediately. See table below for examples.

MANUALLY EXPIRING PENDING MESSAGES

Due to these retry strategies it is prudent to set a pending expiry time for campaigns otherwise it is possible for messages to retry at undesirable times. Message expiry function when active has a default of 4 hours.

SYSTEM EXPIRY OF PENDING MESSAGES

After 72 hours all remaining pending messages will be system expired and set to soft bounce status.

CARRIER SPECIFIC RETRY STRATEGIES

Australia


CARRIERSTRATEGY
TelstraTotal of 72 hours. One retry every 10 min for first hour, One retry every hour for 2 hours and then One retry every 2 hours for the remaining hours.
VodafoneTotal of 72 hours. Four retries in total at 5 min, 10 min, 2 hours and 24 hours
OptusTotal of 24 hours. Four retries in total at 5 min, 10 min, 2 hours and 24 hours