uConnect offers an automated email feature under the Engage section of the admin dashboard in your uConnect platform that can send emails, at a cadence of your choosing, to your subscribers based on the content they've selected or that you have tagged to them. You have three frequency choices to enable - daily, weekly, or monthly - and you can enable more than one, but there are nuances to the frequency enabled and the subscribers' content selections that we'll explore in this article.
Key Concepts
1) Subscribers have a stored frequency
Each subscriber is saved as one of the following:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Inactive (does not receive emails)
2) Each cadence has its own “send job”
Daily, Weekly, and Monthly emails are run by separate scheduled jobs. A job only runs if its specific cadence is enabled in settings.
Important: If a cadence is disabled, the system does not automatically “fall back” to another cadence for subscribers whose stored frequency matches the disabled cadence.
What happens when a subscriber’s frequency has no enabled cadence?
If a subscriber is stored as Weekly, but the Weekly cadence is disabled, they will receive nothing from the Weekly cadence.
There is no automatic roll-up (e.g., Weekly → Monthly) just because Weekly is turned off.
How Monthly works (and why it can look like a fallback)
The Monthly email is designed as a broad digest and is sent to all active subscribers, not only “Monthly” subscribers.
That means the Monthly send typically includes subscribers stored as:
- Monthly
- Weekly
- Daily
So you can see a situation like this:
- Weekly is disabled → weekly subscribers do not get weekly emails
- Monthly is enabled → those same weekly subscribers can still receive the monthly email
These facts are not contradictory because they are caused by two separate jobs:
- The Weekly job won’t send if Weekly is off.
- The Monthly job (when on) is built to include a superset of subscribers.
Subscriber preferences are preserved (nothing destructive)
Turning a cadence off does not:
- clear subscriber preferences
- change stored frequency values
It only stops that cadence’s job from running. If you re-enable the cadence later, delivery resumes automatically for the subscribers whose stored frequency matches it—no restoration step needed.
Cadence precedence (to prevent duplicates)
On days where two cadences would overlap, the system prevents duplicate emails by using a “replacement” rule:
- Monthly replaces Weekly on the monthly digest day
- Weekly replaces Daily on the weekly digest day
So, in order of precedence:
Monthly > Weekly > Daily
This ensures subscribers do not get multiple automated emails on the same day.
What a Weekly subscriber experiences over a month
A subscriber stored as Weekly should receive one email per week, but the content type changes depending on whether the month’s “Monthly digest day” occurs that week.
Example pattern across a 4-week month:
- Week 1: Monthly
- Week 2: Weekly
- Week 3: Weekly
- Week 4: Weekly
(Which week is “Monthly” depends on your Monthly configuration.)
Why they don’t get both that week:
On the monthly digest day, the system skips the Weekly send for weekly subscribers and the Monthly email “stands in” for that week’s weekly message.
Net result for a weekly subscriber:
They still receive ~4 emails per month (one per week), but one of them is the Monthly digest instead of the standard Weekly digest.
What a Daily subscriber experiences
Daily subscribers receive a daily email except:
- on the Weekly digest day (Weekly replaces Daily)
- on the Monthly digest day (Monthly replaces whatever would have been sent)
So they continue to receive regular communications without getting duplicates.
“One-direction only” sweep behavior (important configuration warning)
The “bigger digest includes smaller frequencies” behavior works only in one direction:
- A Monthly send includes Weekly + Daily subscribers
- A Weekly send includes Daily subscribers
- But a Weekly send does not include Monthly subscribers
- And a Daily send does not include Weekly or Monthly subscribers
Example: “All my subscribers are Monthly, but I only have Weekly enabled”
They would receive nothing.
Because Monthly is “above” Weekly in the hierarchy, Weekly does not reach up and include Monthly-only subscribers. To send to those subscribers, you must either:
- re-enable Monthly, or
- change their stored frequency to Weekly/Daily.
Practical takeaway (common scenario)
If many subscribers are stored as Weekly, and Weekly is disabled:
- they won’t receive Weekly emails
- they may still receive the Monthly digest (if Monthly is enabled)
- their Weekly preference remains saved, and will resume working if Weekly is turned back on