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Delivery times

The Dashboard lets you check the status of a message, to see when it was delivered.

To keep recipient data safe, this information is only available for 7 days after a message has been sent. You can download a report, including a list of sent messages, for your own records.

Find out what each message status means.

Emails

Notify commits to sending 95% of emails within 10 seconds.

Once an email has been sent, our email provider will try to deliver it to the recipient for up to 72 hours.

Open rates and click-throughs

Notify cannot tell you if your users open an email or click on the links in an email. We do not track open rates and click-throughs because there are privacy issues. Tracking emails without asking permission from users could breach General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

Text messages

Notify commits to sending 95% of text messages within 10 seconds.

Once a message has been sent, our text message provider will try to deliver it to the recipient for up to 72 hours.

We send text messages through different providers. If one provider fails, Notify switches to another so that your text messages are not affected.

Letters

Letters are printed at 5:30pm and dispatched the next working day (Monday to Friday).

First class letters should be delivered one day after they’re dispatched. Second class letters should be delivered 2 days after they’re dispatched. Royal Mail delivers from Monday to Saturday, excluding bank holidays.

Letters to Europe should be delivered 3 to 5 days after they’re dispatched. Letters sent anywhere else in the world should take 5 to 7 days to arrive.

Returned letters

Every letter we send includes our print provider’s address on the back of the envelope. You cannot customise the return address.

Undelivered letters are returned to our print provider and destroyed.

You can see a report of returned letters on the dashboard.

Identify the returned letters

To help you identify what letters are returned, the report will show details such as the:

  • template ID
  • date the letter was sent
  • a reference for each letter if you include either:
    • a column called ‘reference’ in the list of addresses you upload
    • the reference argument when making an API call if you use the Notify API

Automate identifying the returned letters

Use the Notify API to get the returned letters report and identify the letters. Follow the instructions in our API documentation.

You’ll need a developer on your team to set this up for you.