The JobDetail service is used to request detailed information about a job and its deliveries. It uses a minimal XML schema combined with CSV data to produce a detailed yet concise result. The user's application must be able to parse the CSV (comma separated values, RFC4180-compliant) element values that carry the data in the result.

Unlike the JobDeliveryStatus service, the JobDetail service limits users to requesting information for a single job. There may be more than one job returned in a JobDetailResult if the job requested is a job group "head", but, for the most part a JobDetailResult will contain information on a single job and its deliveries.

The type and amount of information returned in a JobDetailResult can be specified on a per-request basis. Users can specify the names of the fields they want to retrieve for both job-level data (see Common Job-Level Keywords) and delivery item-level data (see Common Item-Level Keywords). If the user does not specifically identify the fields they want to retrieve, a default set of fields will be used. In addition to defining the data set to retrieve, a user can also specify a date/time window that limits the request to events that occurred with the window.

The JobDetail service also supports "chunking". Chunking allows users to limit the number of delivery-level records retrieved on a per-request basis. A flag in the JobDetailResult will indicate the end of a data set when there are no more records that match the request parameters.

Finally, users can choose to "hide" various types of delivery events. Arrival, Removal and Pull events can all be omitted from the result if not needed or wanted.

The JobDetail and JobDeliveryStatus functions largely provide access to the same information, and users should consider which is best for their purpose. JobDeliveryStatus may be simpler to program for, since it does not require parsing CSV lines and matching column headers and values. However, JobDeliveryStatus will return many data fields that may not be of interest to the user, and the XML format may result in very large result documents. JobDeliveryStatus allows for data for more than one job to be requested, while JobDetail only allows for one job at a time (although even JobDeliveryStatus requests should be limited to no more than a few jobs at a time) The JobDetail function uses a more compact format and provides better control over the data fields that are returned, and also offers better "chunking" capabilities which can help limit the size of result documents. Additionally, only JobDetail provides access to individual delivery attempt information for the same item (although this information is only available for users and jobs with appropriate settings.)