What are quiet hours and how does the queue drain at 8 AM?

Why quiet hours exist

Two reasons:

Legal. Federal TCPA prohibits telemarketing calls (and increasingly is being read to cover SMS marketing) before 8 AM or after 9 PM in the recipient's local time. Several states have stricter rules: Florida bans telemarketing before 8 AM or after 8 PM; Mississippi bans before 8 AM or after 9 PM; and a handful of states have weekend-specific rules. The 9 PM cutoff in InsertLead's quiet hours is the safe-everywhere default.

Effectiveness. Even if late-night texting were legal, it works terribly. Reply rates from messages sent between 11 PM and 6 AM are catastrophically lower than messages sent at 9 AM or 1 PM. Late-night sends also get reported as spam at a much higher rate, which damages your sender reputation. There is no upside.

The 9 PM-8 AM window in detail

We hold messages whose intended send time would land in the 21:00-08:00 window in the recipient's local timezone. Concretely:

• You start a campaign at 4 PM Pacific.
• The campaign engine starts draining at adaptive-throttle pace.
• Each message is checked: "what's the recipient's local time when this would send?"
• If the answer is between 9 PM and 8 AM, the message is held in the quiet-hours queue.
• Otherwise, the message sends.

So a campaign that started at 4 PM Pacific running into the evening would gradually shift more messages into the queue as the clock crossed 9 PM in different timezones — East Coast first, then Central, then Mountain, then Pacific. By midnight Pacific, the queue is full and no messages are sending until morning windows open.

How we know the recipient's timezone

We infer the recipient's timezone from their phone number's area code. The first three digits of a US phone number (the area code) map to a state and a primary timezone. So a phone number with area code 305 (Miami) is treated as Eastern; 415 (San Francisco) is Pacific; and so on.

This is approximate — some area codes span timezones (Florida has both Eastern and a small slice of Central), and people move with their phones. But for the purposes of "is it 11 PM where this person is," it's accurate enough that quiet hours catches 95%+ of true after-hours sends.

When a phone number's area code is ambiguous or invalid (rare for cleaned-up imports), we default to Eastern Time as the safest guess.

The 8 AM drain

When a recipient's local clock crosses 8 AM, every message in their quiet-hours queue is eligible to send again. The drain rate is one message per second across the full queue (not per recipient — per total queue), to avoid a thundering-herd flood at exactly 8:00:00 AM Eastern when 30,000 messages all try to send at once.

In practice, this means:

• At 8:00 AM Eastern, Eastern-zone recipients start getting messages drained at 1/sec.
• At 8:00 AM Central (9:00 AM Eastern), Central-zone messages start draining.
• And so on across timezones.

By the time the West Coast hits 8 AM, the rest of the country is well into the day and the queue is mostly drained. A typical campaign that gets caught in quiet hours at 9 PM finishes draining by ~10 AM the next morning.

The dashboard shows the queue size with a live-decrementing counter so you know when your campaign has fully sent. In the morning report (the overnight digest banner that appears at 8 AM your time), the count of "drained from queue overnight" is one of the headline numbers.

Exceptions: AI replies vs campaign sends

Quiet hours apply to two kinds of outbound:

• Campaign sends — the first-touch outreach you initiate. Always quiet-hours protected.
• AI autoresponder replies — the responses Claude drafts. Always quiet-hours protected.

In other words: even if a lead replies at 11:30 PM, the AI's response will hold until 8 AM the next morning. This is a deliberate choice. A wholesaler who actually texts back at 11:30 PM doesn't sound like a wholesaler; they sound like a bot or a creep. Holding the reply preserves the human-paced impression.

The one exception: if YOU manually text a lead back from inside the inbox UI, we send immediately, no queue. Manual sends bypass quiet hours because you're an adult who knows what you're doing. The AI doesn't get that latitude.