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Mailbox providers watch how people react to your mail. Gmail’s subscription manager lists senders by how much they send and lets people unsubscribe from several at once, and mail that goes unread is shown less prominently. Sending every campaign to every contact is the fastest way to lose both. The cadence policy holds back a marketing email from a contact when they have had enough recently, based on what they did with your previous emails. It is off until you turn it on.

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Turn it on

Go to Settings → Send policies and switch on Cadence policy. You need permission to change workspace settings. The card shows Estimated impact on the last 30 days: how many of your recent marketing emails the weekly limit and your contacts’ own frequency choices would have held back. The fatigue and dormant rules would hold back more, so treat it as a lower bound.

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The rules

Each marketing email is checked against these rules in order. The first one that applies is the reason recorded. Contacts created in the last 7 days are exempt from the fatigue and dormant rules. Machine opens (security scanners, image prefetching) never count as engagement. You can change every number, switch the fatigue and dormant rules off, or set a cooldown to 0 to turn it off.

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What it never does

  • It never touches transactional email. Receipts, password resets and account messages sent with a transactional send policy are not checked.
  • It never unsubscribes or suppresses anyone. A held-back contact misses that one email; the next send checks again.
  • It never uses AI. The rules are fixed and every decision can be explained from your own sending data. No contact data leaves InstantCampaign.

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Contacts choose their own frequency

While the policy is on, the hosted preference centre asks How often? with four choices: every email, at most once a week, at most once a month, or only occasionally. The choice only ever lowers your limits; “every email” does not lift your weekly limit. The question is shown in every language the preference centre supports.

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Seeing what was held back

  • Send wizard: the audience step shows About N recipients will be held back by the cadence policy (estimate).
  • Analytics → Skipped: every held-back recipient is listed with the reason, for example Cadence (cadence_cap): Reached the workspace limit of 3 marketing emails in 7 days. Held-back recipients are counted as skipped, never as failed.
  • Contact page: the contact’s frequency choice, what the policy would decide for a marketing email right now and why, and the last time a send was held back.

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Urgent mail

For an email that must reach everyone, such as a service notice sent as marketing, turn on Ignore cadence for this send in the last step of the send wizard. The choice is recorded with your name.

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Automations

Send email steps in automations follow the same rules. A held-back contact’s step is recorded as skipped with the reason, and the contact continues through the automation.

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How it works with warm-up and deliverability checks

Deliverability checks run first and can stop a whole send. The cadence policy then decides per contact, before the warm-up limit is applied, so held-back contacts never use up your warm-up allowance.