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Marketing SMS, voice, push and WhatsApp are held during nightly quiet hours and during Shabbat. This is a legal requirement under Israeli anti-spam law and it is applied at the message, not in the builder. Marketing email is exempt from that legal block. That carve-out is explained below, and it matters in both directions: getting it wrong either stops you sending email you are entitled to send, or sends SMS you are not.

Nightly quiet hours

20:00 to 08:00, Asia/Jerusalem. Marketing SMS, voice, push and WhatsApp are held for the whole of that window.

Shabbat

Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall, computed from real sunset in Jerusalem for that date, with candle-lighting 18 minutes before and havdalah 40 minutes after. It moves through the year, so it is not a fixed Friday-afternoon cutoff.
The window is judged on the clock in Israel, not on where the recipient is. A marketing SMS at 21:00 Israel time is held for every recipient on that send, including numbers outside Israel. There is no per-recipient timezone version of the legal window.

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Which channels are blocked

Voice has no consent of its own. A voice call is gated as SMS: it reads the contact’s SMS consent, honours SMS suppression including STOP replies, counts against the SMS frequency cap, and spends SMS credits. Opting out of SMS opts the contact out of voice.
Campaigns can be email, SMS or push. Voice and WhatsApp are automation steps.

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Why email is exempt

Marketing email does not carry the legal quiet-hours or Shabbat block, and this is a deliberate product decision. Israeli law regulates the carrier-delivered channels, where a message physically wakes a person’s phone. Email marketing is not carrier-regulated the same way, and the person who bears the cost of badly-timed email is the merchant whose sending reputation it damages, not a carrier. So the timing decision on email is yours.
What this means in practice:
  • An email campaign can be scheduled for 23:00 on a Friday and it will send.
  • An automation that sends email keeps running through the night and through Shabbat.
  • Email still honours the quiet window you configure for your workspace, and any blackout window you set on the campaign. Those are your choices, so they are enforced.
  • Best-time sending is the one exception, and it works against email too. See below.
If you want your marketing email to stay quiet at night or on Shabbat, set a custom workspace quiet window. That is the lever.
The campaign wizard is currently stricter than the send itself. When you pick a date and time inside 20:00 to 08:00 or inside Shabbat, the Schedule step warns you and blocks Continue even on an email campaign, although the send would have been allowed. Turn on Send during quiet hours or Send during Shabbat to clear the warning and save the campaign. Nothing about the email carve-out changes; the switches only get you past the wizard’s check.

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Your own quiet hours

Go to Settings → Sending Settings → Custom quiet hours.
1

Turn on Add a custom quiet window

The window is off by default.
2

Set Pause from and Resume at

Whole hours only, from 0 to 23. A window that wraps past midnight, such as 22 to 6, is supported.
3

Pick a timezone

Your window is evaluated in the timezone you choose. The legal window is always evaluated in Asia/Jerusalem, whatever you pick here.
4

Save quiet hours

It applies to every marketing send in the workspace from that moment.
The window is ignored if it is switched off, if either hour is not a whole number from 0 to 23, or if the start and end hours are the same. There is no confirmation that it was ignored, so check the values look right after saving. On SMS, voice, push and WhatsApp the two windows are combined, and a send is held if either applies.
You cannot configure your way out of the legal window. Setting your own quiet hours to 02:00 to 03:00 does not re-open 20:00 to 08:00. Your window only ever adds blocked hours.

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On email it is the only window

Because email has no legal floor, your custom quiet window is the entire timing rule for marketing email. If you set 20:00 to 08:00 on your workspace, your email behaves like SMS. If you set nothing, email sends whenever you schedule it.

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Per-campaign blackout window

The campaign wizard’s Schedule step has a Block sending window control. Set a start and end hour and that campaign is additionally held inside it. Two things about it are worth knowing:
  • It applies to email as well. Unlike the legal window, the blackout is your own instruction, so it is honoured on every channel.
  • The Send during quiet hours override also lifts it. The blackout sits inside the same check, so switching that override on removes your blackout for that campaign along with the quiet-hours hold.
It is evaluated in the campaign’s scheduling timezone, falling back to Asia/Jerusalem.

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Campaign overrides

The Schedule step has two switches:

Send during quiet hours

Bypasses the 20:00 to 08:00 hold, your workspace quiet window, and your campaign blackout window, for this campaign only.

Send during Shabbat

Bypasses the Shabbat hold for this campaign only.
Both are recorded in your audit log the moment the campaign is scheduled, as Campaign compliance override, naming which of the two was used. Read it at Settings → Audit Log. Use them for a genuine documented exception, such as a test to your own number or an audience that explicitly agreed to overnight alerts. They are not a way to blast at 02:00, and the record of who turned them on is permanent.
Turning one on clears the matching schedule warning in the wizard and lets the campaign save. A blackout window warning is not cleared by the switch in the wizard, so to save a campaign scheduled inside your own blackout, move the send time or remove the blackout.

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Per-automation-step overrides

An SMS, voice or WhatsApp step in an automation has its own pair of switches in the step inspector, both on by default:
  • Respect SMS quiet hours holds the step during 20:00 to 08:00.
  • Respect Shabbat, shown underneath it, holds the step from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall.
Turning Respect SMS quiet hours off bypasses the legal Israeli window for that step, not just your own. It also turns off the Shabbat hold at the same time, because the Shabbat switch is nested underneath it and only applies while the quiet-hours switch is on. Treat both as compliance controls.
The label says SMS, but the same pair governs voice and WhatsApp steps. Email steps have no such switch, because they have no legal window to lift.

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Scheduling a campaign into a blocked window

You are stopped up front, not silently deferred. The wizard checks the time as you pick it, shows This send time will be rejected with the reason, and blocks Continue until you fix it. Saving anyway through the API is refused the same way, and the refusal comes back with a suggested time: the next moment that clears every window that applies, searched forward in 15-minute steps. The four reasons you can be stopped for:
Your own window from Settings. Pick another time, relax the setting, or turn on Send during quiet hours. This one genuinely applies to email campaigns too.
The Block sending window you set on this campaign. Move the send time or remove the blackout. It applies to every channel, email included.
Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall. Pick another time, or turn on Send during Shabbat.As with quiet hours, an email campaign is only stopped by the wizard here, not by the send itself. The wizard also uses a rough estimate, Friday from 18:00 to Saturday 21:00 Israel time, rather than the exact sunset the send uses, so the two can disagree near the boundary. The send is the one that is exact.

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What happens at send time

A message can still reach a blocked window after it was scheduled legitimately. A slow fan-out, a wait timer in an automation, or a staggered rollout batch can all drift past 20:00. When that happens the message is held, not lost.
1

The message is held

Nothing is sent and nothing is charged. The message stays pending on the campaign.
2

It retries at the next allowed moment

The retry is scheduled for the next instant that clears every window, and never sooner than 15 minutes from now.
3

It sends when the window opens

Nothing is duplicated. Each attempt releases its send claim and takes it again, so a held message that later goes out goes out exactly once.
Holding is bounded. A message gets 16 attempts. After that it is dropped and reported as Send window expired. This is what happens when your windows leave a message almost no room to fire, for example a workspace quiet window that is nearly a full day. If you see that reason on a campaign, check your quiet hours and the campaign schedule before resending. The search for the next allowed moment looks up to 4 days ahead.

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How it interacts with each send mode

Everyone gets the message at the same moment. The moment is checked when you schedule, so a blocked time is refused up front. Recipients whose send drifts past 20:00 during a long fan-out are held and retried.

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Automations and wait timers

A wait step expires on time and the automation moves to the next step normally. The window is checked on the message that step then tries to send. So a wait that ends at 21:30 does not stretch itself; the SMS it leads to is held and retried until 08:00. This distinction matters for anything time-sensitive. A wait can be as long as you like, but the message it produces gives up after the retry limit above.

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Test sends

A test send skips the consent, quiet-hours, Shabbat and frequency checks so you can preview your own message whenever you want. If you test-send at 02:00 on a Saturday and it arrives, that tells you nothing about your real audience. Check the behaviour with a small scheduled campaign instead.

Israeli compliance

Opt-in, STOP, transactional messages and the consent log.

Consent and compliance

Consent states, the log and suppression in detail.

Campaigns

The Schedule step, send modes and overrides.

SMS

Sender names, segments and the unsubscribe trailer.