Understand campaign statuses

Find the status

Open Campaigns from the sidebar. Above the list sits a row of pills: All Campaigns, Sending, Sent, Draft and Scheduled, each with a live count beside it. Click one to filter the list to that state.

The Sending pill is the only one that comes and goes. It appears only while something is genuinely in flight, and disappears once everything has finished, so an empty pill never sits there confusing you.

Every campaign in the list also wears its own status chip next to its name, so you can read the whole picture without filtering at all. Open a campaign and the same chip sits under the title in the header, alongside the campaign type and, where it applies, a Gradual chip.

Open your campaigns in Mailsoftly

Draft

A campaign starts as a Draft and stays there until you send it or schedule it. It is yours to edit, duplicate, rename or throw away, and nothing about it is visible to anyone outside your account.

The footer of each draft row tells you where you left off. A draft you have written in reads Last edited, followed by how long ago. A draft with no content at all reads Empty draft, add content to continue, which is not an error: it is a campaign shell waiting for an email.

On the campaign itself, the Review & Send button stays greyed out until the setup is complete, and hovering it tells you how many fields are still missing. A campaign that comes back from a scheduled state, or from a test that our team approved, lands back here as a Draft.

Scheduled

Scheduled means you picked a moment and the campaign is waiting for it. Under the hood it is still a draft, which is why you can keep editing it right up to the send.

The row footer counts down: Sending in a number of minutes, hours or days. On the campaign page a Scheduled for pill shows the exact date and time in the campaign’s own time zone, with the zone spelled out beside it, and a View in calendar pill drops you onto that date in the campaign calendar.

Two things you can do from here. Manage Schedule reopens the picker so you can move the date, the time or the time zone. Unschedule removes the date entirely and, as its confirmation says, the campaign goes back to a draft and nothing will send until you schedule it again or send it now.

Sending, Gradual Sending, and the send queue

Sending means the campaign has passed every check and is being worked through. Mailsoftly does not hand a large campaign to the mail servers in one go: it walks your audience in batches, with a pause between them, which is gentler on your sending reputation and on the receiving inboxes. Smaller campaigns tend to clear faster than large ones for the same reason.

While a campaign is in flight, its row footer reads Sending, with the number of emails already out, the total, and a progress bar. Open the campaign and the stats page shows the same band, refreshing while you keep the page open. A campaign that has only just started, before the first batch has left, reads Currently being sent.

There is no cancel button here, and no edit. Once a campaign is in the queue it is on its way, and the content, audience and sender are fixed.

Gradual Sending is the deliberate version of the same idea, spread over days rather than minutes, and it gets its own chip. It is the one in-flight state you can still steer: Manage Gradual Sending lets you adjust the plan, and Cancel Gradual Sending stops the remaining days. A gradual campaign you stopped part way wears a Stopped early chip afterwards, which records what happened rather than reporting a failure.

An A/B test also counts as in flight and is included in the Sending pill’s count, though it shows its own A/B test running pill on the campaign page with a Decide now and a Stop button.

Under Review and Test Pending Review

These two are the states people mistake for a rejection. They are not. They mean a person is going to look at the campaign before it leaves, which is how we keep every sender on the platform out of the spam folder.

Under Review is the normal path for a new account’s first campaigns. The chip’s tooltip says so: this campaign is being reviewed to prevent spam and ensure sending quality. The row footer adds the timing, in review, usually approved within a few hours. A campaign that carries a link or a button will go to review while your account is still new, and so will a campaign from an account whose sending is being checked after a run of bounces or complaints.

Test Pending Review is the same idea for a test send. Pressing Send Test Email on a brand new account does not fail, it parks the test until someone approves it. Its button carries a tooltip saying your first test sends are reviewed by our team before they go out, usually within a few hours.

There is no button that gets you out of either state, because the approval is not yours to give. Two things do help. Connecting a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailbox gets a verified business approved straight away, and the review window offers exactly that with a Connect Google Workspace and a Connect Microsoft 365 button. And once a mailbox is connected, a test sent from your own account goes out instantly, which the row footer points you at.

When approval lands you get an email, and the campaign moves on: a reviewed campaign becomes Sending, and a reviewed test send hands the campaign back to you as a Draft.

Sent, and what the header tells you

Sent means the last batch has left. The campaign page header now carries a Sent at date, a Recipient pill naming the list it went to, and a count of how many people it actually reached.

That Recipient pill is worth reading carefully. On a sent campaign it shows the number at the moment of the send, not the size of the list today, and hovering it spells that out: sent to a number of contacts, the list has a different number of contacts today, and anyone added after the send did not receive this campaign. A list that has grown since the send will always look larger than the campaign that went to it.

From here the Reports tab appears next to Campaign Details and Campaign Stats, Duplicate Campaign gives you the whole thing again as a fresh draft, and the campaign can be archived without losing any of its numbers. Track your campaign results walks through the reading side of a sent campaign.

Why the sent count is lower than the list count

This is the single most common question about a finished campaign, and there is a clear answer.

Every send in Mailsoftly, whether it is a normal campaign, a gradual send, an A/B test or an automation email, goes through one gate before a single message leaves. That gate removes five kinds of recipient, in this order:

• Suppressed addresses. Anyone on your suppression list, which is built automatically from hard bounces and spam complaints. Read your suppression list explains how an address gets there.
• Full unsubscribes. Anyone who used the unsubscribe link and turned everything off.
• Partial opt-outs. Anyone who kept some email but switched off campaigns or newsletters in your preference center, and anyone who opted out of the specific email type this campaign carries.
• Duplicates. If the same address sits on the list twice, it receives one email, not two.
• Broken addresses. A blank email, or one that is not a valid address at all, is skipped at the moment of sending.

On top of those, two things about lists themselves widen the gap. Anyone who joined the list after the send did not get the campaign, and a campaign sent to a segment goes to the members that segment held at send time, not the members it holds now.

The campaign tells you when this happened. On the Campaign Stats tab, under the tiles and again under Detailed Statistics, a line reads that a number of the recipients were skipped and did not receive this campaign, because those addresses previously bounced, opted out of these emails, or joined the list after sending.

Once the emails are out, a further slice never lands: a bounce is an email the receiving server refused. Bounces show as their own tile with their own rate, separate from everything above, and Monitor deliverability and reputation covers what to do when that number climbs.

The series badge

Send a campaign, then duplicate it and send it again, and the list would fill up with rows sharing one name. Instead, Mailsoftly collapses them.

When two or more sent campaigns share exactly the same name, only the most recent one stays in the list, wearing a small badge with a clone icon and a multiply sign followed by the number of sends. Click the badge and the earlier sends unfold underneath it, each a full row with its own numbers, so you can compare a monthly newsletter against itself.

The name is the only thing that makes a series. Two campaigns with the same name are a series even if their content is entirely different, and renaming one of them breaks the series apart. Because Duplicate Campaign keeps the name, a duplicated and resent campaign joins the series automatically.

The badge only appears on the unfiltered list. Search for something, or filter by contact list, and every send shows as its own row again.

Archived campaigns

Archiving is how you get a campaign out of the way without destroying it. An archived campaign keeps its content, its recipients and all of its statistics; it simply stops appearing in All Campaigns, Sending, Sent, Draft and Scheduled.

To archive one, tick it in the list and press Archive selected in the bar that appears, or use the archive box control on the row itself. To find archived campaigns again, click the page title at the top of the campaigns screen and choose Archived from the dropdown. To bring one back, open Archived, select the campaign and press Unarchive selected, and it returns to whichever tab its status belongs in.

Delete is the different one. It is irreversible, it says so in its confirmation, and it is the only action on this screen that actually removes a campaign and its numbers.

Archiving in bulk, and the search and filters that make an old campaign findable again afterwards, are covered in Keep your campaign list organized.

Several campaign states look alarming and are not. Under Review is the normal first-send path, not a rejection. A blank open rate on a campaign sent an hour ago means tracking events are still arriving, which is why the tile shows a collecting state rather than a flat zero. A click rate that reads no links in this email is telling you the email had nothing to click. Stopped early on a gradual campaign records a cancellation you made, and what went out stayed out. A sent count below your list count is the gate in step 7 doing its job. And a campaign that has vanished from every tab is almost always archived rather than deleted.

The one state worth acting on is a campaign paused for a deliverability review, which says so in a banner: an unusual number of addresses bounced or complained, our team is looking into it, and cleaning your contact list helps it resume sooner. That is the sentence to take seriously.