Automations Have Three States — Here's When to Use Each

An automation in the email app is always in one of three states: draft, active, or paused. The names are intuitive enough that it's easy to assume you already know exactly what each one does — and easy to be slightly wrong about the details in a way that matters.

Draft is for building. A draft automation isn't enrolling anyone, isn't running, and can be freely edited — reorder steps, change delays, swap templates — without any risk of affecting subscribers who are mid-sequence, because there are none yet.

Active is running for real. New subscribers matching the trigger are being enrolled, and enrolled subscribers are progressing through steps as their delays elapse. This is also the state where editing gets riskier: changing a step's template or delay on an active automation affects subscribers currently partway through it, not just future enrollees, since there's only one version of the automation running at a time.

Paused is the state that's most often misunderstood. Pausing stops new enrollment and stops processing steps — but it does not clear out subscribers who are already enrolled. Their enrollment record persists; they simply stop advancing until the automation is made active again. This is what makes paused the right state for editing an already-running sequence: you stop the clock without losing who's currently in it, fix what needs fixing, then reactivate and let processing pick back up.

The practical rule that follows from this: never edit an active automation's steps if you can pause it first. And when you do pause one, check your enrollment counts before assuming nothing's happening — active, completed, and cancelled counts are all visible on the automation, and "paused" with a non-zero active enrollment count means real subscribers are sitting mid-sequence, waiting on you to either resume the automation or make a deliberate call to cancel their enrollment rather than leave them stalled indefinitely.