Click will record the date and time an email was sent in a few different places. Read below to understand where to find this information and understand what it is telling you.
The Email Send
The Email Send is the record in Dynamics that represents the email job that you have put together and submitted to the Click platform for processing. It can be a bulk Email Send that you are sending to 100,000 recipients, an Email Send sent to a Campaign Automation participant, an Email Send that was created as a result of a workflow, etc. The "Sent On" date and time that is recorded in the Email Send record represents the date and time that Click finished processing the job (getting all the recipients, scanning the template for personalization fields, checking your Unsubscribes, etc.) and then handed the job off to our mail servers to begin creating individual email messages.
The "Sent" view of Email Send records includes a column that shows when each Email Send finished processing so the email servers could begin sending out each individual message:
The Email Send form shows when the Email Send finished processing so the email servers could begin sending out each individual message:
Sent Email records
Click also records a Sent Email record for each individual recipient. On the Sent Email record, there is a "Sent On" field. This is the time that the Click email server successfully handed off the email to the recipient's email server:
Why Might the Email Send record's "Sent On" be Different from the Sent Email record's "Sent On"?
When your Email Send finishes processing, the Click application in Azure hands the data needed for the individual email messages to our email servers (also called MTAs - Message Transfer Agents). The job of the MTA is to submit email messages to the recipients' email servers. Very often, the MTA gets an immediate response from your recipient's email server and so the Sent On time is very soon after the Email Send completed processing. Sometimes, the recipient's email server may not be able to accept messages immediately - it might be busy, or it might only accept a certain number of messages at a time. When this happens, the Click MTA will try again a few minutes later, and keep trying for up to 24 hours. (See this article for other reasons why it can take some time to send a bulk email.)
So the Sent Email record will show you the actual date and time that your recipient's email server accepted the message from Click - most of the time this is very fast, and sometimes your recipient's email server will take longer to accept a message - in either case, we will record the time accurately so you have full visibility into when your recipient's email server accepted the email.