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Setting quiet hours for outbound messages

Windows when your organization won't contact residents, in a local time zone — and why an unscoped policy behaves very differently from a channel-scoped one.

By The Kav team Published 2 min read

A quiet-hours policy is a window during which your organization does not contact residents, in a named local time zone. Unlike most settings in the Studio, a policy has no natural key — it's addressed by its own id, because more than one policy is meant to coexist at once.

Creating a policy

  • Time zone — an IANA id, e.g. Asia/Jerusalem.
  • Start and end time, local to that zone.
  • Scope, by purpose — leave blank to apply to every purpose, or pick one (payment reminder, marketing, emergency broadcast, and so on) to scope it narrower.
  • Scope, by channel — leave blank to apply to every channel, or pick one.
  • Allow emergency override — whether an emergency-broadcast purpose message is allowed to bypass this window.

Why scope changes what a hit even means

This is the one thing worth understanding before you create your first policy: a channel-scoped policy is a fact about that channel. Hitting it drops that rung and the campaign's ladder moves to the next channel — email at 22:00 is still fine even if SMS at 22:00 isn't. An unscoped policy (every purpose, every channel) is a fact about your organization as a whole: "we do not contact residents at night," full stop. Hitting an unscoped policy stops the send outright — there's no next rung to fall back to.

Stacking an unscoped night-time policy with a channel-specific one is a normal, supported pattern — not a conflict to resolve. Both apply; the unscoped one is simply the stricter of the two.

Editing and removing

Every existing policy is listed with its window, time zone, scope and emergency-override setting. Edit re-opens the same form pre-filled; removing a policy is immediate, with no separate confirmation screen beyond the button itself.

If a campaign seems to be sending later than expected, check quiet hours before checking the campaign itself — an unscoped policy silently holding every send until morning looks, from the campaign's own report, exactly like a slow send.