The seven states, in order
- Composed: the message exists in your system but has not left it.
- Attempted: your system handed it to a provider.
- Accepted: the provider queued it and returned an identifier.
- Delivered: the carrier or mailbox provider confirmed handoff.
- Received: it is physically on the recipient's device or in their mailbox.
- Read: a human looked at it — usually unverifiable.
- Answered: a reply came back, which is the only state that proves anything.
Why teams over-trust 'sent'
Most interfaces collapse the first three states into a single tick, so a message that a provider accepted but a carrier later rejected can look identical to one that arrived. The consequence is a team that says 'we texted them' when the customer genuinely never received anything.
Email is worse because the failure is silent. A provider can accept and deliver an email that a spam filter then hides. There is no state in the send log for 'delivered but never seen'.
What to do with a failure
Distinguish permanent from temporary. A wrong number, a disconnected line or a hard bounce is permanent — the record needs fixing, not another send. Temporary failures are worth one retry, then a channel change.
The reliable escalation is always the same: if the written channel fails twice, call. A phone call resolves in two minutes what four unanswered texts will not resolve in a week.