Every journey has a **Delivery safeguards** tab with controls that govern how and when emails are sent.
**Brand assignment:** If a journey has no brand, a warning appears on the Builder tab. Assign a brand before activating.
**Purpose & Topic:** - **Marketing** — subject to consent checks and sending windows. - **Transactional** — bypasses consent. - **Topic** — identifier for this journey's category.
**Require consent:** When enabled, a contact's Consent status must be **Opted in**. Contacts with **Unknown** or **Opted out** consent are blocked, as are contacts who opted out of the journey's preference topic. Suppression and delivery safeguards still apply.
**Journey start date:** - Activating a Journey does not override a future start date. - Eligible contacts can enroll as soon as the Journey is active, but their first action waits until the configured start date. - If the starting step is a Wait, that wait duration begins from the start-date gate.
**Delivery time window (local to recipient):** - **Fallback timezone** — used when a contact doesn't have a timezone set. - **Local start / end time** — emails are only delivered inside this window (e.g., `09:00`–`17:00`). - **Allow weekends** — toggle to permit weekend delivery. - **Blackout dates** — specific dates when no emails are sent.
**Per-recipient message cap:** - **Max messages per window** — how many journey emails a single contact can receive. - **Window (hours)** — the rolling window. > **This is per-contact, not global.** A cap of 3 messages per 24 hours means each individual contact receives at most 3 emails in any 24-hour period from this journey.
**Stale expiry (hours):** If a delivery attempt is delayed and hasn't been sent after this many hours, it is skipped as stale. Default: 72 hours.
**Completion goal:** Optionally choose a goal event. Contacts who trigger that event are automatically exited from the journey early.