A campaign is confirmed in Obsedia SMS Marketing Hub, but Results still says queued. Later, some messages say sent, some say delivered and one says unknown. Those labels mark different stages of the same journey. Reading them correctly matters when you answer a customer, investigate a campaign or decide whether another send would create a duplicate.
Three boundaries between a campaign and a phone
Obsedia can prepare and queue an eligible message. Its SMS provider can then accept or dispatch it. A later delivery report can say whether the mobile network delivered it to a handset, rejected it or could not establish an outcome. Each boundary has its own evidence; crossing one does not prove the next.
This is why Results separates queued, sent, delivered, failed and unknown. LINK Mobility's Message Hub documentation also distinguishes a message sent to the carrier from one delivered to the handset. A provider response at submission time should never be rewritten as a confirmed delivery.
Queued and sent are progress, not delivery
Queued means the message is waiting in the sending process. It does not mean a mobile operator accepted it or that the customer received it. A message can stay queued while the app checks eligibility, the sending window, provider availability and the conditions that must still hold before transport.
Sent means dispatch has been recorded at the provider stage. It is useful evidence that the message moved past the local queue, but the carrier may still delay, filter or reject it. If you are checking whether a customer received an order update, sent alone is not enough to answer yes.
Delivered and failed need their own evidence
Delivered is the positive delivery result reported for that message. It is stronger than sent, but it does not prove that a person read the text, followed a link or placed an order. Do not turn a delivery count into a conversion claim.
Failed records a known unsuccessful sending or delivery outcome. A rejected number, provider error or carrier rejection can be possible causes, but the reason for a particular message should come from its status history rather than a guess. Shopify's SMS deliverability guidance notes that carriers can filter messages and may not disclose every reason.
Unknown means the evidence is incomplete
Unknown does not mean delivered, and it does not necessarily mean failed. It means Obsedia cannot safely establish the outcome from the available provider evidence. A transport timeout after submission or a missing usable delivery report can leave that question open.
An automatic resend in that situation could put the same message on the customer's phone twice. Obsedia's product workflow keeps an ambiguous attempt for review rather than silently resending it. Preserve the message reference, check later provider evidence and escalate the unresolved result before making a new sending decision.
Held and unavailable describe a different kind of limit
The app also uses held and unavailable where financial or provider evidence cannot be treated as a completed outcome. Held can mean an ambiguous attempt keeps associated credit on hold while it is reviewed. Unavailable means a reliable result cannot currently be shown. Neither label is a synonym for delivered.
When reconciling a campaign, read the message outcome and the credit state separately. A quoted amount, a reservation or a hold should not be presented as proof that a phone received an SMS. The app's Results view is where the corresponding message history, parts and spend information belong together.
A useful way to investigate one campaign
Start with the campaign and its individual message results. Check the time, destination and status history of the affected recipient. Separate messages still queued from those sent to the provider, and separate confirmed deliveries from failures and unknown outcomes. If many destinations show failures, inspect the sending setup, consent, content and carrier guidance before changing the campaign.
For a single unknown result, retain its reference and seek provider evidence. Do not count it as a delivery in a report or click Send again simply because the first result is uncertain. A later confirmed delivery or failure can resolve the question; until then, report the status honestly.
- Locate the campaign and the recipient's individual status history in Results.
- Treat queued and sent as intermediate states, not handset delivery.
- Count delivered only when a matching delivery result is recorded.
- Inspect the recorded reason for failed messages before changing content or numbers.
- Keep unknown results separate and investigate before any manual resend.
- Reconcile quoted, reserved, spent and held credit with the message outcomes.
Use the status history, not the campaign confirmation, to answer whether a message was delivered. Keep an unknown outcome out of both the delivered and failed totals until evidence resolves it.
