Taking over a marketing stack usually means inheriting automation built by someone who left. The instinct is to leave it running because it seems to work. That is how brands end up sending messages nobody authorised.
Find everything that can send
List every active workflow, its trigger, its audience, and when it last fired. Most teams find flows they did not know existed, and at least one still sending to a list built years ago under consent nobody can produce.
The four questions per flow
- What triggers it, in one sentence?
- Who can it reach, and under what consent?
- When did it last fire and how many people did it reach?
- If it broke, who would notice and how?
That last question is the one that exposes risk. A flow nobody would notice breaking is a flow nobody is watching, and it will keep sending long after it should have stopped.
Kill before you fix
Anything that has not fired in six months, or whose purpose nobody can state, gets paused rather than debugged. Pausing is reversible. Leaving unexplained automation running is not, once it has messaged someone who withdrew consent.
Then wire suppression synchronously
The single highest-value fix in most inherited stacks is making unsubscribe and consent withdrawal propagate immediately rather than on a nightly sync. Measure the current lag before assuming it is fine. Days is common.
General information, not legal advice. Rules current as of July 2026.