Recipient snapshots
When a campaign sends, CartonCrew records exactly who it went to and what consent each of them had held. That record is the recipient snapshot.
This is not a choice you make. It happens on every send, always. This page previously described a Snapshot recipients toggle and told you when to turn it on or off. There is no toggle — there never was a live-evaluating alternative to compare it against.
How the audience is decided
At the moment you click Send to N, CartonCrew works out the audience from scratch:
- everyone with a sendable email address,
- who has granted the consent your comms style requires,
- and who matches the Recipient contact types you ticked (or every eligible type, if you ticked none).
Then it writes that list down, and sends.
Because the audience is computed at send time, someone who opts in this morning is included in this afternoon’s campaign, and someone who unsubscribes this morning is not. There is no stale list to refresh.
Seeing who will receive it
Before sending, open the Recipients tab beside the preview. It shows the count and a sample under Eligible recipients, with a line stating how the audience was derived. Before you save a draft it says “Save the draft to preview eligible recipients.”
That is a preview of the live calculation, not the snapshot. The snapshot does not exist until you send.
The snapshot cannot be edited
Once written it is fixed. It is a consent audit trail — the record of who you contacted and what permission you held at the time — so there is deliberately no way to amend it, and no View recipients control that lets you change it.
A campaign that holds a snapshot cannot be deleted either. Delete is offered only on a campaign that has not been sent, and the server refuses to delete a sent campaign however it is asked. The snapshot is also what takes a person who has since opted out off your mailing list before the next send, so keeping it keeps them off.
Zero recipients fails the send
If the calculation produces nobody, the campaign does not go out and is marked failed, with the reason “No consent-eligible recipients.” It is not a warning you can push past.
The usual cause is ticking Donors (no records yet) on its own — that source resolves to nobody. The other is a comms style requiring a consent tier almost nobody has granted.
A gallery has a third way to arrive here: ticking Requesters or Volunteers when neither is where your people are. The tick list replaces the default rather than narrowing it, so ticking one box excludes the other three — including Customers, which for a gallery is usually where the audience actually is. Leave all four unticked, or tick Customers. See Sending a campaign step 6.
Last updated: 2026-09-20 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.563+