Campaigns resume reliably after being reactivated

A paused campaign should pick up exactly where it left off when you turn it back on. We fixed a case where, after a pause and reactivation, some contacts could quietly stall mid-sequence instead of resuming — and hardened the drafting system so it stays dependable even when a lot of work is in flight at once.

What was happening

When a campaign was paused and later reactivated, the emails waiting to be drafted for some contacts could end up in a state where they were marked as needing a draft, but the job that produces that draft had already been considered finished. The result was a contact who looked active but never advanced — stuck between steps, waiting on a draft that wasn't coming. It only affected a subset of reactivated campaigns, which made it easy to miss but very disruptive when it hit, because those contacts simply went silent.

The fix

Two things changed. First, reactivation now re-drives any email that's waiting on a draft, so a stuck contact is detected and re-queued instead of being left behind. Second, the drafting workers are more resilient under load: a worker keeps its claim on a job alive while it's actively drafting, so jobs aren't repeatedly reclaimed and retried when many are running together. We also added the ability to spot and recover a draft whose claim was genuinely lost, rather than letting it sit indefinitely.

What you'll notice

• Pausing and resuming a campaign is dependable — contacts resume their sequence instead of stalling.
• Drafting keeps pace even during busy periods, without jobs thrashing between workers.
• Contacts that previously would have gone silent after a reactivation now continue as intended.

Fix

Campaigns resume reliably after being reactivated

Why it matters

A stalled contact is an invisible failure: there's no error on screen, just a prospect who stops hearing from you halfway through a sequence — and a follow-up that never arrives is a deal that quietly cools. Campaigns get paused and resumed all the time, for holidays, for edits, for deliverability, so this path has to be trustworthy. These changes make sure that turning a campaign back on does exactly what you'd expect, every time, no matter how much else is running.

For extra safety, the same recovery runs automatically on startup, so even an unlucky interruption can't leave a contact permanently stranded — the next health check finds the stalled draft and re-drives it. And because the drafting workers no longer fight over the same jobs under load, the whole system stays calm and predictable exactly when it's busiest. The net effect is simple to state and hard to engineer: a campaign you resume behaves like a campaign that was never paused.