Help · Audience

Pause and resume

Pausing is your own reversible decision to stop emailing and texting someone for a while. Park a seasonal group for ten months and mail them in Q4. Give one person the break they asked for. Then resume, and everyone goes back to exactly where they were.

Two sentences hold the whole feature:

• A paused person stays paused until you resume. There are no timers and no scheduled release, ever. Nothing un-pauses on its own.
• Their consent is untouched. A pause is your decision; consent is theirs. Pausing never writes, changes, or clears anybody's consent.

Pausing one person

Open the person's profile, open the menu at the end of the Email row of the consent card (the three dots), and choose Pause emails…. Confirm, and emails you send skip this person until you resume.

You are asked to confirm, under the person's name: Pause emails to this person? Emails you send will skip this person. They stay paused until you resume. Their consent is untouched.

You can add an optional note — a sentence for whoever reads this next, including you in four months. The placeholder suggests the shape: why this person is paused — e.g. asked for a break until November.

Afterwards the profile shows a Paused mark, who paused them, the day, and the note in quotation marks so it is never mistaken for something the app wrote.

When a person was paused along with a whole list or segment, the profile also says which one — Paused with the list Wholesale or Paused with the segment Buyers — with the name linked to that list or segment, under its name today if you have since renamed it. If that segment has since been deleted, the line says so instead: Paused with a segment that has since been deleted. A list you have deleted is still named and linked, followed by (archived), because you can restore it from Show → Archived on your lists screen. The pause itself stays either way, and Resume on the profile works the same however the person was paused.

Pausing a whole segment

On your segments screen, open a row's menu (the three dots at the end of the row) and choose Pause emails….

The confirmation names the segment, tells you how many people it would pause and when that number was counted, and says: Emails you send will skip the people in this segment. They stay paused until you resume. Their consent is untouched. The same optional note applies, and it lands on every person the pause covers.

When it finishes, the app tells you what happened — for example, Paused emails to 4,182 people. 37 were already paused. Someone already paused stays as they were, with their original note and stamp intact, so a second pause never overwrites a colleague's record.

A very large segment can be too big to pause in one pass. If that happens the app says so, nothing is changed, and trying again is safe.

Pausing a list

Open the list, open the Actions menu at the top of its page, and choose Pause emails…. It works exactly like pausing a segment, with the same optional note and the same sentence afterwards saying how many people it paused.

The confirmation names the list, tells you how many people are on it and when that number was counted, and says: Emails you send will skip the people on this list. They stay paused until you resume. Their consent is untouched.

It pauses the people on the list right now. Someone you add to the list tomorrow is not paused by it, and someone you take off the list stays paused until you resume them.

Resuming

Resuming one person returns them to their own consent state — whatever it was before you paused them. It does not send anything.

Resuming a segment releases more than the segment currently holds, on purpose. The confirmation says it outright: this releases everyone you paused with this segment, including people who have since left it, and anyone in it you paused for another reason.

Both halves matter. A rule's membership moves — somebody you paused in March may not match the rule any more, and if resuming only reached current members, those people would be stuck paused with no way back. And "let these people hear from me again" is not a claim about which screen stopped the mail, so a resume also releases members you had paused individually.

Resuming a list works the same way. Choose Resume emails… from the list's Actions menu, and the confirmation says: This releases everyone you paused with this list, including people since removed from it, and anyone on it you paused for another reason.

The number in the confirmation counts exactly the people the button will release, so what you approve is what happens.

What a pause does and does not stop

A pause applies to marketing email and texts. It does not touch the email your store sends about an order somebody placed — if a paused person buys something, they still hear about their order. A pause means "stop marketing to these people for now", not "cut them off".

Paused people are still in your segments and on your lists. They are still counted, they still appear in a segment's members preview and on a list's page, and they still match a segment's rule. Only the audience that actually gets mailed excludes them. That is the distinction to hold on to: being in a segment is a fact about the person, being paused is a fact about your mail.

Because of that, a segment's count can be larger than the number of people a send reaches. So can the difference consent makes. Neither is a fault.

Pausing and text messages

A pause holds your marketing texts too. The button says Pause emails…, and it covers both channels: a paused person gets no marketing email and no marketing text until you resume. There is no separate pause for texts.

Texts that are not marketing still go to a paused person:

• a reply you type to them in Conversations;
• your answer when they text STOP or HELP.

One more thing a pause stops: if a paused person signs up on one of your forms with their phone number, the six-digit code is not texted to them. The sign-up still goes through, and the number waits unconfirmed until they fill in a form again after you resume.

You pause; they STOP. The two are easy to mix up and they are not the same. A pause is your decision, and you undo it. STOP is the person's own word, texted from their phone, and only they can undo it — by texting START. Resuming somebody who texted STOP does not bring their texts back.

Seeing who is paused

A Paused mark sits beside the person's name, on the profiles screen and in a segment's members preview. Both carry the same Show filter, offering Everyone, Paused only, or Not paused.

The mark always sits beside the person's name, never beside their consent. That adjacency is deliberate: a pause must never be read as a consent decision.

Who may pause and resume

Marketers, managers and owners. Viewers do not see the pause and resume actions at all — the menu items are simply not there.

It sits with sending, which is where it belongs: the person who decides what goes out is the person who decides it should stop going to somebody. A resume can re-open mail to thousands of people at once, so it is worth a second look before you press it, but it is not a decision we take away from the people doing the work.

Nobody at Carpe Messaging can pause or resume for you, even while we are looking at your store to help. We can show you where the control is; the press is yours.

One thing worth knowing

A pause outlives the segment or list that placed it. If you delete a segment or a list that you had used to pause people, those pauses stay in force, and the way back is to resume each person from their own profile. Resume before deleting if you can.