The plan has lapsed
A lapse and three unrelated causes produce the identical symptom: Connect has gone quiet. Each one has a signature that separates it from the others in seconds — whether mail is still arriving, whether drafts are still being written, and what the refusal message actually says. Check those three before assuming a billing problem, because two of the four are settings.
The symptom, and why it is ambiguous#
Nothing is going out. Perhaps nothing is coming in either. The screens all work, the records are all there, and no error is shouting at anybody. That description fits a lapsed plan, a spent allowance, a runtime mode somebody changed, and a mailbox that has quietly stopped authenticating — four causes with four different fixes.
Guessing wrongly is expensive in an unhelpful way: paying an invoice does not fix a workspace sitting in Draft only, and changing a mode does not fix an expired subscription.
Tell them apart in three questions#
| Cause | Is new mail still arriving? | Are drafts still being written? | What the refusal says |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lapsed plan | No | No | The workspace is not live for sending, or the trial has ended |
| Spent daily allowance | Usually yes | Usually yes | Today's limit has been reached, and when it resets |
| Runtime mode | Yes | Yes | Nothing at all — there is no refusal, because nothing was refused |
| Mailbox health | No, on that mailbox only | Yes, for other channels | A health verdict on the mailbox, and a prompt to reconnect |
The middle two columns do most of the work. A lapse closes the metered gate for the whole workspace, so ingest and model work stop alongside sending; an allowance is one counter among several, so the rest carries on; a runtime mode refuses nothing, because drafting and holding is exactly what it was asked to do.
Confirming a lapse#
- Open the account view and read two fields: the plan code, and whether the workspace is live for sending. Everything else follows from those.
- If the plan is a trial, check its end date. A trial past its end reports as expired even where a stored status still says otherwise — that is deliberate, so an expiry cannot be missed by reading the wrong field.
- If the plan requires a current pass alongside the subscription, check that separately. An expired pass refuses in the same shape as an inactive plan and is fixed differently.
- Read the refusal itself. It names the state; it is written for the person who hit it rather than for an engineer.
What Connect completed, and what it did not#
Completed: everything that ran before the gate closed, and every read since. Nothing has been rolled back, nothing has been archived, and nothing at all has been deleted.
Not completed: sending, fetching new mail, and model work for the workspace. Each was refused at the point of reservation rather than half-done, and each refusal left the work waiting. The mail read cursor did not move, so nothing at the provider was skipped.
What to do, and who does it#
- You, right now
- Confirm which of the four causes it is before escalating anything. Two are fixed from inside the app in seconds.
- A workspace administrator
- Restore the plan, or correct the mode, or reconnect the mailbox. When a plan lapses lists exactly what is affected while it is down.
- Before it runs again
- Read the held queue. Drafts written before the stoppage answer older messages, and approving a fortnight of them unchanged reads badly to every customer who receives one.
- Afterwards
- Follow A lapsed plan and its recovery for the resumption order and the four checks worth making first.
Escalate when the account view says the workspace is live and metered work is still being refused with a plan message. That combination is a contradiction rather than a limit, and it does not resolve itself at midnight.
Questions#
How do I know it is the plan and not a setting?
Ask whether new mail is still arriving. A lapse stops ingest as well as sending, because both are metered. If mail is still coming in, the workspace is live and the cause is a mode, a counter or a mailbox.
Is any mail lost while the plan is down?
No. Messages sit at your provider, and because a refusal never advances the read cursor, the next successful sync collects the whole gap. What is lost is the time nobody spent replying.
Can I still export my records while the plan is lapsed?
Yes. Reading, searching and exporting are not metered and are not gated by the plan. A lapse is a commercial state, never a lock on a workspace's own data.