Mandrill API shows 'sent' status wrongly

Question

I've been trying to use the Mandrill API to send transactional emails. While testing, I tried to send to an invalid email '[email protected]' and got this response

{"list":[{"email":"[email protected]","status":"sent","_id":"dab5afcb3b2643aba6abad8cb2f72e09","reject_reason":null}]}

This response is obviously misleading. However, when I logged into the web interface, the status for the said message displays as 'Soft bounced' and also gave 'Invalid Domain' as the reason, rightly so.

Can anyone explain why there is inconsistency in the status messages?

Thanks

Answer 1

The Mandrill "Sent"-status doesn't actually mean that it is sent, only that Mandrill have received the message for processing. Extremely confusing and not very well documented. I only understood this after several emails with Mandrill support.

The only way of seeing if an email is actually sent (i.e. successfully delivered to the receiving mail server) is to see if the message has an smtp_event with a diag starting with 250.