Reference

Automation triggers

Reference for every automation trigger by context, with their options and filters, what fires them, and the trigger keys to use with the API.

Updated Oct 1, 2026

A trigger decides when an automation starts a run. This page lists every trigger available in each context, what fires it, its options, and the key you use for it in the API.

How triggers work

One trigger per automation in the dashboard. Select the trigger on the canvas and change it with Trigger type. With the API, Contact and Email automations can have several triggers, as long as they all connect to the same first step. Event automations have exactly one.
The automation must be running. Triggers in draft, paused or stopped automations are ignored. Events from before you start an automation don’t start runs later.
Runs start within seconds. Emailit picks up new events every few seconds.

Filters

Contact updated and every email trigger take an optional filter, under Filter events (optional). Each rule compares one field of the event with a value:

Operators: Equals, Not equals, Contains, Not contains, Greater than, Less than, Is set, Is not set, In, Not in, Starts with and Ends with. Greater than and Less than compare numbers. The rest compare text and are case-sensitive.
Match mode: All rules match or Any rule matches.

With the API, a filter is { "match": "all", "rules": [{ "field": "...", "operator": "equals", "value": "..." }] } in the trigger’s config.filter, with match set to all or any. Fields are paths into the event’s object, for example to or link.url.

Contact triggers

Trigger	API key	Options	Starts a run when
Added to audience	`contact.added_to_audience`	Audience. Leave it empty for any audience.	A contact joins the audience, or is added back after unsubscribing.
Removed from audience	`contact.removed_from_audience`	Audience. Leave it empty for any audience.	A contact’s membership in the audience is deleted.
Contact updated	`contact.updated`	Optional filter	A contact’s email, names, custom fields or marketing status change.
Date anniversary	`contact.date_anniversary`	Date field	Once a year, on the month and day stored in a date custom field.

Added to audience

Fires when someone is added to an audience from the dashboard (Add subscriber, Add to audience, Add contact with audiences), with the API (Add a subscriber, or Create a contact with audiences), or with the Add to audience bulk action. Adding back someone who unsubscribed also fires it.

It doesn’t fire for contacts added by a file import, a subscribe URL sign-up, or another automation’s Add to audience or Create contact step, and turning Subscribed back on for an existing subscriber doesn’t count either.

Removed from audience

Fires when a subscriber is deleted: Delete on the audience page, Remove from audience, Delete a subscriber, or a contact update whose audiences list leaves the audience out. Deleting a contact fires it once for each audience the contact was on. Unsubscribing doesn’t fire it, because the person stays on the audience.

Contact updated

Fires whenever a contact is updated in the dashboard or with the API, including the Unsubscribe and Resubscribe bulk actions. The filter can check the current Email, First name, Last name, Unsubscribed and custom fields, and their previous values, listed as Previous email, Previous first name and so on. Previous values are only present for the fields that changed.

For example, to react when a contact moves to the pro plan, add two rules with All rules match: custom_fields.plan Equals pro, and Previous plan (previous.custom_fields.plan) Not equals pro.

Date anniversary

Pick a Date field, a custom field of type Date such as a birthday. Once a day, Emailit starts a run for every contact whose date has today’s month and day, in UTC. The year doesn’t matter, so a contact with 1990-04-12 gets a run every April 12. Each automation handles up to 10,000 contacts per day.

API-only contact triggers

API key	Starts a run when
`contact.loaded_email`	A contact loads a tracked email sent to their address.
`contact.clicked_in_email`	A contact clicks a tracked link in an email sent to their address.
`contact.on_date`	A contact’s date field, set in `config.date_field`, equals today’s date in UTC. Fires once, not every year.

The API also accepts contact.visits_url, contact.on_purchase and contact.on_event, but nothing fires them yet.

Email triggers

Email triggers fire for emails in your workspace: everything you send with the API or SMTP, campaign and automation emails, and inbound email for Email received. Each run is about one email.

Trigger	API key	Starts a run when	Filter fields
Email delivered	`email.delivered`	The recipient’s server accepted the email.	From, To, Subject, Status
Email bounced	`email.bounced`	The email failed permanently.	From, To, Subject, Status
Email failed	`email.failed`	The email couldn’t be sent because of an error.	From, To, Subject, Status
Email suppressed	`email.suppressed`	The email wasn’t sent because the recipient is suppressed.	From, To, Subject, Status
Email complained	`email.complained`	The recipient reported the email as spam.	From, To, Subject, Status
Email received	`email.received`	An inbound email arrived. See Inbound.	From, To, Subject
Email loaded	`email.loaded`	The recipient loaded a tracked email.	Recipient, Sender, Subject, IP address, User agent
Email clicked	`email.clicked`	The recipient clicked a tracked link.	Recipient, Sender, Subject, Link URL, IP address, User agent

The editor also lists Email accepted, Email scheduled, Email attempted and Email rejected. Automations with these triggers can’t be saved yet, so pick one of the triggers above. With the API you can also use email.canceled, which fires when a scheduled or queued email is canceled.

Event triggers

Event automations can only be created with the API for now.

Trigger	API key	Starts a run when
Manual trigger	`system.manual`	You call Trigger a run.
Schedule	`system.schedule`	Reserved. Nothing fires it yet, so call the trigger endpoint from your own scheduler, such as a cron job, instead.

Manual trigger

Call the trigger endpoint of a running automation, with an optional payload object:

Terminal

curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/automations/aut_3Mv8Xq2nKp5Lt/trigger \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "payload": { "email": "ada@example.com", "plan": "pro" } }'

The endpoint returns { "message": "Automation trigger dispatched." }, or 422 if the automation isn’t running. Steps can read the payload as {{payload.email}}, {{payload.plan}} and so on. Emailit adds automation_id to the payload.

system.manual also works as a trigger in Contact and Email automations created with the API. Include contact_id (a con_ ID) or email_id in the payload to run the automation for that contact or email.

Data available to steps

Step settings, such as the recipient of Send email or the values of Edit contact, can include placeholders that are filled in for each run:

Placeholder	Contains
`{{contact.<field>}}`	The run’s contact in Contact automations, for example `{{contact.email}}` or `{{contact.custom_fields.plan}}`.
`{{email.<field>}}`	The run’s email in Email automations, for example `{{email.rcpt_to}}` or `{{email.subject}}`.
`{{payload.<path>}}`	The event that started the run. For webhook-style events, the event’s data is under `payload.object`, for example `{{payload.object.to}}`. For manual triggers, it’s your `payload`.
`{{meta.<path>}}`	Extra data Emailit stores about the run.

Email templates sent by Send email use Temple with the same data. See Steps.

Steps

What a run can do once it starts.

Webhook event types

The events behind contact and email triggers.