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Guards

Guards are account-wide safeguards that protect your contacts from a poor experience. The first guard is Send limits — a cap on how many marketing emails or texts a single contact can receive from you in a given stretch of time, counted across everything you send: campaigns, journeys, broadcasts, and one-off sends alike. Without it, a contact enrolled in several campaigns at once could get a flurry of messages in a day; with it, you decide the ceiling once and it applies everywhere. Only admins can view and change these settings, since they affect every customer-facing message your account sends.

Guards are turned off by default — nothing changes until you switch them on. They sit on top of your existing protections (unsubscribes, opt-outs, and do-not-contact flags still work exactly as before); Send limits is an extra layer, not a replacement.

Steps

  1. Open Settings and go to the Guards tab. If you're not an admin, you'll see a message explaining that access is admin-only.
  2. Turn on Enable send limits to activate the cap.
  3. For each channel, set two numbers:
    • Max messages — the most a contact should receive.
    • Every N days — the length of the rolling window that count applies to. For example, 5 messages every 7 days means a contact won't receive a sixth marketing email until enough time has passed that they're back under five in the last seven days. Email and SMS are counted separately, so you can be more generous on one channel than the other.
  4. Save your changes. The cap takes effect on the next sends; it does not retroactively change anything already delivered.

What happens to a contact who's over the limit

When a send would push a contact past their cap, that contact is simply skipped for that send — the message isn't delivered to them, and the rest of the audience goes out normally. Skipped contacts are not counted in your sent totals or open/click rates, so your reports reflect who actually received the message.

If a particular message truly needs to reach everyone — an urgent announcement, say — you can override the cap for that one send. On a Send step inside a journey, or on a Broadcast, turn on Ignore send limits (there's a ? next to it that explains what it does). That send will then go to everyone it targets, even contacts who've already hit their cap.

Tips

  • Start conservative. A weekly cap (for example, 5 emails / 7 days and 3 texts / 7 days) is a sensible default you can loosen later.
  • Reserve Ignore send limits for genuinely must-reach messages. Overriding the cap too often defeats the point of having one.
  • The cap only governs how many messages go out. Who is eligible in the first place is still decided by your segments, subscription lists, and unsubscribe/opt-out status — Send limits runs after all of those.

FAQ

Q: Does the limit apply per campaign, or across my whole account? A: Across your whole account, per contact. Every campaign, journey, and broadcast counts toward the same per-contact total, which is the point — it stops separate campaigns from unknowingly piling onto the same person.

Q: Are email and SMS counted together? A: No. Each channel has its own limit and its own count, so hitting the email cap doesn't affect texts and vice versa.

Q: Do skipped messages show up in my reports? A: No. A contact skipped by a send limit is excluded from that send's recipient count and from its engagement rates, so your numbers reflect messages that were actually sent.

Q: What happens if I turn Guards off again? A: Sending goes back to having no per-contact cap immediately. Your other protections (unsubscribes, opt-outs, do-not-contact) are unaffected — they're always on and are separate from Guards.