See when a campaign cannot move forward

Improvement

See when a campaign cannot move forward

A campaign that cannot send now says so, and says why. The reason appears on the campaign with the step needed to clear it, rather than leaving you with a campaign that looks fine and produces nothing.

What changed

A campaign can be stopped by several things that are not the campaign's fault. The mailbox it sends from can lose its connection. The sending schedule can have no hours left in it. The list can be empty, or every lead on it can already have been contacted. Warmup can be holding the volume down.

None of these used to show on the campaign. The campaign said active, because it was active. It simply had nothing it was allowed to do.

The result was a campaign that appeared healthy for days while sending nothing, and the discovery usually came from noticing the reply count had stopped moving rather than from anything the product said.

Now the campaign shows the blocking reason directly. Each reason names the specific thing that is stopping it and the action that would clear it.

How to use it

Open a campaign that is not sending. If something is blocking it, the reason is at the top, not buried in a settings screen.

The reason names the cause and the fix. A disconnected mailbox tells you which mailbox. An empty schedule tells you no sending hours are configured. An exhausted list tells you every lead has been contacted.

Clear the cause and the campaign resumes on its own. There is no separate restart, and no need to pause and unpause to shake it loose.

Why it matters

Silent failure is the worst kind, because nothing prompts you to look. A campaign that errors loudly gets fixed the same day. A campaign that quietly sends nothing gets fixed whenever somebody happens to check.

The gap between those two is measured in days of lost sending. For a campaign in a time sensitive window, those days are the whole campaign.

Naming the reason also removes the guessing. Without it, a campaign that is not sending could be any of half a dozen problems, and the usual response is to check all of them in sequence. With it, you check the one.

The reasons you will see

No connected mailbox. The mailbox this campaign sends from is disconnected or was removed. Reconnect it and sending resumes.

No sending hours. The schedule has no window in which sending is permitted. This usually happens after editing a schedule and removing the last remaining slot.

No leads available. Every lead on the list has been contacted, or the list is empty. Add leads or point the campaign at a different list.

Warmup limit reached. A newer mailbox is on a warmup ramp and has used its allowance for the day. This is working as intended and clears itself tomorrow.

Daily limit reached. The campaign has sent everything its daily limit permits. Also normal, also clears tomorrow.

Which of these need you and which do not

Warmup and daily limits are not problems. They appear so that a quiet campaign is explainable, not because you should do anything about them. A campaign showing a warmup limit is behaving correctly.

Disconnected mailboxes, empty schedules, and exhausted lists do need you. None of them clears on its own, and every hour they stay is an hour of sending that does not happen.

The display distinguishes between the two, so a campaign at its daily limit does not read as urgent.

Checking without opening every campaign

The campaign list shows the state at a glance, so a workspace with a dozen campaigns does not require opening each one to find the stuck one.

This makes the check something you can do in a few seconds rather than something you put off. Most stuck campaigns are stuck for a reason that takes a minute to fix once you know which minute to spend.

How campaigns end up blocked

Almost none of these happen at launch. A campaign that starts sending is a campaign whose mailbox, schedule and list all worked at the moment you launched it. The blockage arrives later, usually from a change made somewhere else for a reason that had nothing to do with this campaign.

Mailbox disconnections are the clearest example. Somebody changes an account password, the provider revokes the app password issued under it, and three campaigns that share that mailbox stop the same afternoon. Nobody connected the password change to the campaigns, because from the outside they are unrelated events days apart.

Schedule edits are the next most common. Sending windows get narrowed to avoid a holiday or a launch, and the narrowing removes the last slot without anyone noticing that nothing is left. The schedule screen shows an empty week, which looks like a schedule rather than an error.

List exhaustion is the least alarming and the easiest to miss. It is not a fault at all. The campaign did what it was asked to do and ran out of people, and without something saying so, a completed campaign and a stuck one look identical from the dashboard.

What this does not tell you

It reports whether the campaign can send, not whether it should. A campaign that is sending steadily into a list of poorly matched prospects shows no blocking reason, because nothing is blocking it. The reasons are about mechanics.

It also cannot see problems on the receiving side. A campaign sending happily into spam folders is unblocked by every measure available here, and finding that requires the deliverability screens rather than this one.

Treat a clear campaign as confirmation that the plumbing works, and keep judging the campaign itself on its replies.

Availability

Live now for all campaigns on all plans. Blocking reasons appear on the campaign and in the campaign list without any setting to switch on.