We're proud to announce that scheduled sends are now available with Email API. Developers can now set a future delivery time for a message instead of sending it the moment the request goes out, then check its status, change the time, or cancel it before it goes.

What's happening

Customers building appointment reminders, billing notices, and other time-sensitive patient communications asked for a way to queue a message ahead of time rather than build their own scheduling logic to hold it and fire it later. For example, suppose a practice management platform books an appointment three weeks out but wants the reminder email to land in the patient's inbox at 8 a.m. the day before the visit. Scheduled send handles that timing without the application having to track and trigger it itself.

How it works

Four new endpoints, all under /v1/email/schedule, cover the full lifecycle:

  • POST /v1/email/schedule schedules a message. It uses the same payload as a standard Email API send, plus a scheduled_at timestamp.
  • GET /v1/email/schedule/:sourceTrackingId checks a scheduled message's status.
  • PATCH /v1/email/schedule/:sourceTrackingId reschedules it to a new time.
  • POST /v1/email/schedule/:sourceTrackingId/cancel cancels it, as long as it hasn't started processing yet.

A scheduled message moves through pending, then processing, then sent, cancelled, or failed. The scheduled time has to be in the future and no more than 30 days out.

Scheduled send is a REST API feature. There's no dashboard view for scheduled messages, so hold on to the sourceTrackingId returned when you create one. It's what you'll use to check on, change, or cancel that send later.

Learn more in the Email API dev docs.

Included with every plan

Scheduled send is included with every Email API plan, including the free tier.

Customer feedback is part of the Paubox Foundations. If there's an Email API workflow you'd like to see built in next, let us know.