---
title: "Automations"
description: "Emails that send themselves when someone joins a list or does something in your product."
url: "https://openemail.uk/docs/knowledge/writing/automations"
area: "Knowledge base"
category: "Writing & sending"
status: "live"
---

# Automations

Emails that send themselves when someone joins a list or does something in your product.

## Details

- An automation is a trigger and a path of steps. It starts when a contact joins an audience, signs up through a form, does something your product reports as an event, reaches a birthday or the anniversary of joining, or is added by hand. From there each person walks the path at their own pace.
- A step sends an email from one of your published templates, waits, asks a yes or no question, adds the contact to an audience or removes them from one, updates a field on the contact, calls a webhook, or ends the path. A wait lasts for a set time, until a weekday and hour, or until an event arrives. A yes or no step sends people down one of two branches, and a field can be one of the custom fields you keep on a contact.
- You build it on a canvas under Automations. Edits are a draft, so nothing changes for anyone until you publish. Publishing freezes the draft as a version: people already inside finish on the version they entered with, and people who enter afterwards get the new one.
- A send window and a time zone hold emails for working hours, so a step that comes due at night waits for the morning. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and a person who unsubscribes leaves the automation.
- The People tab shows who is inside and which step each person is on. The Report tab counts, for each step, the people who entered, finished and left, and the emails sent, delivered, opened and clicked.
- A plan covers 1 live automation on Free, 10 on Starter, 50 on Business and any number on Enterprise. After a downgrade, the newest automations beyond the allowance pause until you upgrade or pause others.
- Automations are on the REST API under /automations, in every SDK as automations, on the command line as openemail automations, and on the MCP server, where an agent can build one, publish it and see who is inside.