About simulating a Task
In MailUp you can simulate the execution of a task to determine whether it was set up correctly.
For example, if you know that there are around 200 customers in your ecommerce store that have spent over $1,000 in the last 12 months, and you create a triggered message that will send a message automatically to customers that - over time - reach that threshold (i.e. the field that stores the total purchased in the last 12 months contains a value higher than 1,000), then you know that simulating the triggered message "today" should return around 200 recipients as the result. If the result is 50,000, then there's something wrong in the way the triggered message was setupĀ 
Ecommerce and triggered messages
In the example above (a message sent automatically when the total purchased over a certain amount of time exceeds a certain dollar amount) we assume that MailUp is being used together with an ecommerce application, and that order data from the ecommerce application is being "passed" to MailUp. This can be done - for example - with one of the "ready to go" ecommerce integrations available to MailUp users, or with a custom ecommerce integration.
How to simulate a task
To simulate the execution of a task, go to theĀ list of existing tasks, and then selectĀ "Simulate"Ā from theĀ Actions menu.
The system will check the conditions that have been set for the task and return the total number of recipients that the task would target if it were run at that very moment in time.
For example, in the example below, a simulation is run on the triggered message "Welcome Series: Email #1". The system checks how many recipients at that very moment match the conditions set for the triggered message. The simulation indicates that - if the triggered were run now - the message will be sent to 850 recipients.
In this example, the system also indicates that there are 59 discarded recipients. Those are subscribers to the List that match the conditions set for the task, but were already selected by the task in a previous mailing (e.g. the automation runs daily in the morning, and I run the simulation on the same day, a few hours later).