The five stages of a certified email, from submitted to opened

Every MailProof email moves through a sequence of tracked stages, each timestamped, so you can see exactly where a message got to.

The five stages are:

1. Submitted — MailProof has received your message and it has entered the certified relay.
2. Dispatched — the relay has sent the message on towards the recipient's mail server.
3. Delivered — the recipient's mail server has accepted the message. This is the key delivery moment, captured from the SMTP handshake.
4. Confirmed — the delivery is confirmed and the record is finalised into your certificate.
5. Opened — the recipient has opened the message, where their email client allows this to be detected.

There is also a Delivery Failed state, which appears if the recipient's mail server did not accept the message.

The most legally significant stage is Delivered/Confirmed, because that is the point the recipient's own server took the message. Opened is a helpful extra where available, but as covered in our tracking guidance it depends on the recipient's email client and its absence does not prove non-receipt.