Scheduled mailings

Available on Starter and above

Pick a future date and time for a campaign instead of sending immediately. Useful for: Tuesday-9am newsletter slots, product-launch announcements, time-zone-friendly sends to international audiences, and avoiding Friday-afternoon deploys when reply traffic would land in a quiet support inbox.

How to schedule

1. Compose your mailing at /mailing/compose as normal.
2. Above the Send button, set the Schedule for later datetime input.
3. Click Send — the mailing's status flips to scheduled instead of queued.

Clearing the field reverts to immediate-on-next-sweep behaviour.

What happens behind the scenes

• The MailingSenderService background sweep runs every 10 seconds and only picks up mailings whose Status = queued AND (ScheduledFor IS NULL OR ScheduledFor <= now).
• A scheduled mailing sits at Status = scheduled until its time arrives, at which point the next sweep transitions it to sending and starts shipping.
• Recipients are still hygiene-filtered (bounced / globally-unsubscribed) at send time, not at schedule time — so a contact who unsubscribes between scheduling and sending is correctly skipped.

Editing or cancelling

Open the mailing from /mailing while it's still in scheduled state. You can:

• Edit subject / body — reopens compose with all fields preloaded.
• Reschedule — pick a new datetime, save.
• Delete — cancels the send entirely.

Once the status flips to sending the mailing is in flight and you can no longer edit or cancel without contacting support.

A/B tests + scheduling

A/B testing and scheduling work together. Scheduled-for kicks in first; once the scheduled time arrives the A/B sample portion ships, the mailing flips to ab_waiting, and the AbTestWinnerService picks the winner after the configured decision window.

Worked example — Tuesday 9am newsletter

1. Friday afternoon: write next Tuesday's newsletter in the visual builder.
2. Set Schedule for later to next Tuesday 09:00 in your timezone.
3. Click Send. Status goes to scheduled.
4. Saturday: a contact unsubscribes — correctly excluded at send time on Tuesday.
5. Tuesday 09:00 UTC: sweep picks it up, ships to the surviving recipients.
6. Tuesday 09:01: stats start populating on /mailing/{id}/stats.

Related

• Email Mailing — compose page basics
• A/B testing mailings
• Drip campaigns — for time-relative ("Day +3") rather than absolute scheduling