Every receipt in a batch carries its own delivery status, visible as a pill on the Email, Mail, and All receipts tabs of the Distribute hub. This article covers what each status means, how bounces and opens are tracked, and how to resend an email.
Status meanings
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending email | Donor has an email on file; not sent yet |
| Email sent | Successfully handed off to your mail server. Not final: a wrong or bounced address can be corrected and the email resent (see below) |
| Pending mail | Needs a physical copy |
| Mailed | Marked as printed and sent (an end state) |
| Skipped | A staff member opted this one out of delivery (an end state) |
On the All receipts tab you can filter by any of these, or by “Outstanding” to see everything still pending. A receipt can move between Pending email and Pending mail at any time — for example, flip a donor with no email address to Mail, or send a bounced email’s receipt to Mail instead — either from the row’s kebab menu or as a bulk action.
Bounce and open tracking
If an email you sent bounces, use the Report bounced action (from the row menu or the bulk action bar on the Sent list) to move that receipt to Pending mail, so it doesn’t stay stuck showing as sent when the donor never actually received it. Reporting a bounce is a manual step — check your email provider’s own bounce or delivery reports and report the affected receipts here.
Every receipt email also includes open tracking: an invisible tracking pixel records when the donor’s email client loads the message. From Batch History, open a sent email’s record to see its first-opened and last-opened timestamps. Because many email clients block images by default, open tracking is best-effort — a donor who didn’t register an open may well have still read the email.
Resending
From the Email tab’s Sent list, select recipients (or use “select all matching this filter”) and choose Resend to N recipients, or resend to everyone in the list at once. You’ll see a confirmation before it goes out, since donors receive a new copy of the email, rebuilt from its email template as it is now. The receipt PDF attached is the stored PDF, unchanged. Resending is free and uses no credit. Each resend is tracked as its own email batch, linked back to the original send, so the audit trail shows both.
A resend never goes out without its receipt attached. If a receipt’s PDF has expired, that receipt is not resent: it is marked failed with “the PDF has expired” and is not counted as sent, while the others in the same resend still go. Distribute tells you before you confirm how many will be refused, and says nothing was resent if every one would be. Regenerate the PDF on the receipt’s page (1 credit), then resend.
The first send follows the same rule. A receipt whose PDF has expired, or that has no PDF, is not sent: it stays in Pending with the reason shown on its row and is not counted as sent, while the others in that send still go. Distribute notes before you send how many selected receipts will be left out, says how many were not sent afterwards, and says nothing was sent if every one is affected. Regenerate the PDF on the receipt’s page (1 credit; a test run uses none), then send.
When you resend a replacement from Cancel & Replace, the email attaches the replacement and each cancelled original it replaces, newest first, each stamped CANCELLED. The first send of a replacement carries the replacement only.
Resends are subject to the same daily sending budget as a fresh send; see Daily-Batched Email Sending if a large resend is refused or paced out over more than one day.
Correcting an email address and resending
If an email went to the wrong address or bounced, you don’t need to report the bounce first. Open the row menu on the Sent, Mail or All receipts tab and choose Correct email & resend. It is offered on an emailed receipt, and on one that Report bounced moved to mail. An inline panel opens under the row, not a dialog.
- The panel shows the current address. Enter the new one; its format is checked as you type.
- Say what happened: it bounced, it went to the wrong address, the donor asked, or Other. Other needs a note, which is kept in the Audit Log and never sent to the donor.
- A preview shows who the email goes to (you, on a test run), the template and sender of the last send, the attachments, whether it will wait for approval, and any PDF that has expired.
- Click Confirm & resend, then click again to confirm (“Click again to resend to …”). Nothing is sent until the second click.
Confirming updates the address on the receipt and on the donor, records “Email address corrected” in the Audit Log with the old and new address and the reason, and resends with the same template and sender. Earlier send records keep the address they went to. The resend costs no credit. If the new address is the same as the current one (apart from case or spaces), nothing is changed.
If the run’s email step requires approval, the corrected resend waits for an approver first; the panel names who. If a PDF has expired, the address is still corrected but nothing is sent: regenerate the PDF, then correct the address again (the same address) to send it.
Delivery report export
Click Generate delivery report at the top of the Distribute page to download a CSV of every receipt’s delivery status alongside a summary PDF — useful for a paper trail of who was emailed, who was mailed, and who was skipped, independent of the app.
Related
- The Distribute Hub — where these statuses and actions live
- Daily-Batched Email Sending — how large sends and resends are paced
- Email Setup — connect and troubleshoot your email provider