Annoyance Level

Sending too many marketing emails can lead to:

• emails going to spam;
• more unsubscribes;
• lower contact loyalty.

This situation often occurs when a contact belongs to several segments or workflows and receives multiple emails.
Annoyance Level limits the number of Email and Mobile Push messages a contact receives per day or per week. This helps control sending frequency and prevent excessive messaging.

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Note

To control sending frequency across all channels globally, use Frequency Strategy and Subscription Categories.

Enable Annoyance level

Before you enable Annoyance Level, make sure you have admin access to your account settings. Then enable Annoyance Level and define the daily and weekly point limits.

1. Go to Settings → Laboratory and enable the Annoyance Level toggle.

2. Expand the settings and define the limits.

Annoyance Level includes:

• a daily limit;
• a weekly limit.

Reteno calculates the limit individually for each contact. Each message can have its own annoyance level based on its type and frequency: you choose the number, and the platform has no fixed scale of points per message type. A message is sent only if the contact's limit is not exceeded. Every send that goes through the platform counts toward the limit, no matter what started it — a workflow, a bulk campaign, the API or an integration such as Zapier.

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Note

The limits do not block a contact's first message in a period. If the contact's current annoyance level for a period (day or week) is 0, that period's limit is not applied — the message is sent even if its own annoyance level exceeds the limit. The message's level is still added to the contact's total, so it counts toward the limits for subsequent messages until the period resets. Once the limit has been reached, no further messages go out until the period resets, including those with annoyance level 0 — such messages simply do not add to the contact's total.

Reset Schedule

• The daily limit resets every day at 00:00 UTC.
• The weekly limit resets on Sunday at 23:59 UTC.

Assign Annoyance Level to Messages

1. Go to Messages → Messages and select the message type (Email or Mobile Push).

2. Open an existing message or create a new one.

Email

In the Message settings panel, go to the Annoyance Level section and set the value.

Mobile Push

In the Additional settings, enable Annoyance level and set the value.

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Important

If Email and Mobile Push tokens belong to different contact IDs, limits are calculated separately for each contact.

Example Configuration

An online store uses the following message types:

• Promo campaign — a trigger message sent if a customer has not visited the website for a week.
• New arrivals — a daily campaign about newly added products.
• Company news — a weekly campaign sent every Thursday.

Assigned Annoyance level values:

• Promo campaign — 3 points
• New arrivals — 1 point
• Company news — 2 points

Daily limit example

Daily limit: 4 points.

Assume today is Thursday, and the contact has already received:

• a promo campaign (3 points);
• a New arrivals message (1 point).

The total daily score: 4 points.

The Company news message will not be sent to this contact because the daily limit has been reached. In reports, it is marked as undelivered with the DAILY_ANNOYANCE_LIMIT reason.

Weekly limit example

Weekly limit: 10 points.

If today is Thursday and the contact has already received messages worth 8 points, they can receive until the end of the week:

• one message with 2 points, or
• two messages with 1 point each.

When the weekly limit is exceeded, Reteno stops sending messages to this contact. In reports, such messages are marked as undelivered with the WEEKLY_ANNOYANCE_LIMIT reason.

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Important

• Assign 0 points to a message that should not add to the contact's annoyance level. For an email the field is required and holds 0 until you change it, so 0 points is what a message carries by default — it is not an exemption from the limits.
• A change to a message's annoyance level applies to the next send.
• A workflow launch (Launch test or Launch one time) counts as a real send, not a test, so Annoyance Level limits can block it. The same holds for a prepared message sent with the Send prepared message method: it carries the points of the message behind it. A request that passes the whole content instead of a message, such as Send email message, has no points to count and the limits don't stop it.