What each envelope status means
Your document list shows one of these:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Uploaded, not yet prepared. Nothing has been sent. |
| Ready to send | Fields are placed and recipients are set. Still not sent. |
| Sent | The envelope left draft and is waiting on signatures. See the caveat below — this does not by itself prove an invitation reached anyone. |
| In progress | At least one recipient has signed, others are still outstanding. |
| Completed | Everyone signed. The sealed PDF and certificate are available. |
| Declined | A recipient refused to sign. The envelope is closed and cannot be reopened. |
| Voided | You cancelled it before completion. |
| Expired | It passed its 30-day deadline without completing. |
Declined is the one people ask about most. It means a signer actively chose not to sign — it is not an error and not a delivery failure. The envelope is finished; to continue, send a new one.
Two older statuses, Cancelled and Deleted, appear only on envelopes created before those states were split out. Nothing new is ever put in them.
"Sent" does not guarantee an email arrived. It means the envelope was created and signing links exist. Two cases produce a "Sent" envelope where no invitation was delivered:
- You sent it with
send_invite: false. zSign deliberately emails nobody; you are delivering the signing links yourself. This is the normal setup for embedded and API integrations. - The invitation failed to send. If the email dispatch throws, zSign logs the failure and leaves the envelope in Sent rather than rolling it back.
So if a signer says nothing arrived, do not assume it must have. Check whether the envelope was sent with invitations suppressed, and see article 5.
If you use the API: the wire value for the "Sent" badge is pending. An envelope with "status": "pending" is waiting on signatures — it is not stuck in a queue.