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Notificado

Notify

States and evidence

What each state of a notification and of each recipient means, and what each event proves.

Updated:

Every notification and every recipient has a state. States summarise the recorded events, which are never changed or deleted: each one stores the hash of the one before it, forming a hash chain.

Notification states

State Meaning
draft A draft. Nothing was sent and no credit was used.
freezing The exact message is being built and its hashes timestamped.
frozen Message frozen and timestamped; ready to go.
sending Handing the message to the mail provider.
sent Sent. From here each recipient's events are recorded.
failed Sending failed; the timeline says why.

Recipient states

State What it proves
queued Queued, not sent yet.
sent Our provider accepted the message. Not delivery yet.
accepted The recipient's mail server accepted the message, with its SMTP answer, the remote server's IP and the time. This is the delivery evidence.
opened A tracking image loaded. Always an indicio, never proof of reading.
downloaded Someone downloaded a document through the personal link (time, IP and browser).
acknowledged The recipient confirmed receipt on their page.
bounced The email bounced: the address does not exist or refused the message.
deferred The remote server asked to retry later.
complained The recipient marked it as spam.

The events

  • message.frozen — the .eml and every attachment were hashed and timestamped (RFC 3161) before sending. Proves what was sent.
  • transport.sent — the provider accepted the message for delivery.
  • Delivery, bounce or deferral — the remote server's answer, stored as received.
  • Downloads, openings, recipient replies and the acknowledgement of receipt.

Times are stored in UTC and shown in Colombia time (America/Bogota), with the UTC time beside them.

The constancia de entrega

Once delivery events arrive the constancia is issued: a PDF with the send data, the hashes, the events and the timestamps, digitally signed (PAdES) and with a QR code that leads to /verificar. A constancia can be reissued as a later version; earlier ones remain valid records and verification says which one is current.

The full method is in Evidence method.