PulsePigeonemail infrastructure

A single send generates a sequence of delivery events over its lifecycle: accepted by the sending platform, accepted by the receiving server, and then whatever engagement or failure events follow, such as a bounce, a spam complaint, an open, or a click.

Open and click tracking are probabilistic and increasingly unreliable as a completeness signal (image-blocking, privacy-preserving mail clients, and proxy-based prefetching all distort them), while acceptance, delivery, bounce, and complaint events are comparatively reliable, protocol-level signals.

Delivery events are the raw material behind both webhook notifications and any dashboard-level delivery reporting; the event log itself is the source of truth, not a derived summary.

Related terms

Webhook

An HTTP callback the sending platform makes to a customer's endpoint to report a delivery event as it happens.

Bounce classification

Sorting a non-delivery response into a category (hard, soft, block, etc.) that determines whether and how to retry.

Idempotency key

A client-supplied identifier that lets an API safely retry a request after a timeout without risking a duplicate send.