Sending broadcasts

A broadcast is one email to a whole list (or a single contact) in one action, and it's the platform channel's flagship use: bulk mail on infrastructure built for it, metered against your monthly send pool, never through your personal mailbox. Broadcasts need a paid plan or trial; the sending-channels guide explains the split.

What happens when I hit send?

The broadcast fans out asynchronously: recipients queue, sends process in the background, and the results page updates itself without a manual reload. Status moves from queued to sending to a terminal sent, or partial if some recipients failed. Each recipient becomes an individual send record stamped with the broadcast, so the sends list and each contact's history show exactly what went out.

Who gets skipped?

Every recipient passes the same gate as any other send: suppressed contacts, opt-outs, and invalid email addresses are skipped, not attempted, and the results page counts them under Skipped so list totals always reconcile. A large skipped count is information, not a bug; it usually means an imported list carried opt-outs, which is exactly what the suppression check is for.

Which limits apply?

Three limits can come into play on a broadcast:

• The monthly platform pool (7,500 to 200,000 sends depending on tier). On a trial, the broadcast draws from the flat 1,000-send trial allowance instead, which is one allowance for the whole trial rather than a monthly figure. When the list is bigger than what's left, the composer says so before you send. The recipients that fit go out, and the rest are refused and listed as failed on the broadcast, with the reason. They aren't retried on their own; once you've topped up your on-demand bank or upgraded, duplicate the broadcast to a list of the ones that were refused. Leave out any row whose reason says the send timed out: those may already have been delivered, so sending again could give that person a second copy. On a paid plan with a funded bank, nothing is refused: the overage draws from the bank.
• The warmup cap on a new custom domain. If you're sending from a custom domain still in warmup, the day's warmup allowance caps how much of the broadcast goes out per day, and the rest rolls to the next day. If the broadcast stops before then, those waiting recipients are not sent: each is listed as failed with the reason that the broadcast stopped before their send window.
• The bounce-rate guardrails, which apply in full. A broadcast to a stale list is a common way to hit the 5% throttle mid-send, so read the deliverability guide before your first large one.

What do Gmail and Yahoo require of bulk mail?

Gmail and Yahoo both set rules for bulk senders, and SEMAOS builds the mechanical ones into every broadcast. Google's email sender guidelines apply the bulk rules to anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts: SPF and DKIM, a DMARC record, one-click unsubscribe for marketing mail, and a spam rate kept below 0.3% in Postmaster Tools. Yahoo's sender requirements match them closely and add that unsubscribes must be honored within 2 days.

Each broadcast carries a List-Unsubscribe header with the one-click form defined in RFC 8058, alongside the unsubscribe link in the body, and an unsubscribe takes effect the moment the recipient confirms on the unsubscribe page, or uses their mail app's one-click unsubscribe button. On the shared SEMAOS domain, SEMAOS publishes the authentication records; on your own domain they are the DNS records described in custom sending domains. The spam rate depends on who you send to, which no setting can fix for a list that never asked for your mail.

What tracking do broadcasts get?

Always the full set: open pixel, rewritten click-tracked links, and per-recipient open and click counts on the results page. Unlike the mailbox channel there's no opt-out from tracking here, since bulk mail is where the numbers are meaningful and expected. The usual open-rate caveats still apply.

Can I test two versions against each other?

Yes, that's the composer's holdout option: try two subject lines or two templates on a slice of the list, then send the winner to the rest automatically. It has its own guide: A/B testing broadcasts.

How do I delete a broadcast?

Click the trash icon on its row in the broadcasts list, or Delete on the broadcast's page, and confirm. That removes the broadcast and its results page. Each recipient's send record stays in your send history, so you can still see who received what.

A broadcast that is still going out (Queued, Sending or Measuring) can't be deleted, and its row has no trash icon until it finishes. A scheduled one can, and deleting it cancels the send; scheduling a broadcast covers that.

To delete several at once, tick their rows in the list, or tick the box in the header to take every row on the page you can delete, and click Delete in the bar that appears. You confirm by typing the phrase the dialog shows, such as "delete 3", so the number going is the number you meant. Rows still going out have no checkbox. If one starts sending while you confirm, it is left alone, and the list tells you how many were skipped.

On the Free plan you can still delete old broadcasts. Free can't send new ones, though, so you won't be able to recreate one you delete.

Can I send the same broadcast again?

Duplicate, on any broadcast's results page, opens the composer already filled in with the same template, from-address, subject, and list. If the original was an A/B test, its variants and holdout settings come through too. The name arrives as "Copy of" the original.

Nothing sends until you click Send. Creating a broadcast in SEMAOS is sending it, so there is no half-made copy waiting in a drafts list. Duplicate hands you a filled-in composer and you decide what goes out. Swap the list, rewrite the subject, or send it as it stands.

If something the original used has since been deleted, the composer names it at the top of the form and leaves the replacement to you rather than substituting one quietly. That covers a deleted list, a deleted template, and a sending address that is no longer verified. One case it cannot cover: a broadcast sent to a hand-picked set of contacts rather than a saved list has no audience to carry across, since the composer sends to lists, so you will be asked to pick one.