Clarification on Email Retry Behavior After Quiet Hours Cutoff

​@Silvio6 

• Quiet Hours/Retries – Quiet Hours is checked only when a profile reaches a message action (pre-send); Retries are a channel-level setting that governs post-send delivery failures. They don't talk to each other.
• Retries likely continue regardless of Quiet Hours – once a message is already in retry (soft bounce/temp error), it's not "reaching a message action" again, so Quiet Hours + Discard probably won't reach in and cancel it. Retry keeps running until the configured Retry Period expires. 
• Retry Period is duration-based (hours from queue time), minimum 6 hours for marketing email. There's no setting for "discard unresolved at 00:00."
• Last send at 7:00 PM + 6-hour minimum retry = retries could run until 1:00 AM, past your midnight hard stop.So build the buffer into your send window instead: with a 6-hour retry period, your last marketing send action should cut off by 6:00 PM, not 7:00 PM, so worst-case retry lands exactly at midnight.

​@Silvio6 

Quiet Hours and Retry operate at different layers, so Discard won't stop an in-flight retry:

Quiet Hours gates messages before they're dispatched (evaluated at the action node, with suppression starting 30 min before the window) while Retry is a fixed-duration timer (your 6 hrs) that starts once the message is already in the MTA queue — it runs independently of quiet hours and isn't interrupted by midnight arriving.

So an email sent at 11 PM that soft-bounces will keep retrying until its own 6-hour timer ends (~5 AM), regardless of the 00:00 Quiet Hours cutoff.

No native "absolute expire at 00:00" option exists — retry period is relative (min 6h/max 84h from ingestion), not clock-based.

Workaround: You can cap your send window so send-time + retry period ≤ your hard cutoff. For a 00:00 cutoff with a 6-hour retry, last sends should go out by 6:00 PM, not 7:00 PM.

thanks both! so, after retry period of 6hs, those delays are resolved in bounce? or no resultion and feedback_status finish in “delay”?

I mean, if the message is still not delivered after that retry window, the status of that email will convert in bounce or will keep delay?