Why Your Email Shows a Midnight Send Time (But Didn’t Deliver Until Evening)

If you've ever scheduled an email in Marketo using the "Send in recipient time zone" feature and noticed that the send time shows much earlier than expected, you're not alone.

Here’s a real-world scenario:

You scheduled your email campaign to send at 7:00 PM PST on February 15th, 2025. But when you check the activity log, you see that the "Send Email" event occurred at 12:15 AM PST on the same day. Confusing, right?

Let’s break down what actually happened — and why it makes sense.

What the Activity Log Tells You

When you look into the lead’s activity history, you'll see two key timestamps:

1. Send Email – Feb 15, 12:15 AM PST
   This is when Marketo evaluated and qualified the leads. It queued up the emails and held them for delivery based on each recipient's local time.

2. Email Delivered – Feb 15, 7:00 PM PST
   This is when the message transfer agent (MTA) released the email to the recipient’s inbox, honoring the scheduled time in their time zone.

Why This Happens

The "Send Email" activity means the system processed the leads and got the emails ready to go. Think of it as preloading the send request. However, since you're using time zone-based delivery, Marketo holds those emails until the correct local send time for each lead.

The actual email delivery (what really matters to the recipient) happens later — exactly when it should, based on your scheduled time and the recipient’s time zone.

The Takeaway

If you see an early "Send Email" timestamp, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean the email went out too soon. It just means Marketo did the prep work ahead of time so it could deliver right on schedule.

Time zone sending is doing its job — even if the logs look a little weird at first.