Pause notifications for vacation or PTO

What this is

Pause notifications is a time-boxed hold on the email Verinode and IQ send you: set it before a vacation or a stretch of PTO, and the recurring updates stop landing in your inbox until the return date you picked, then resume on their own with nothing to switch back. It is built for the week you are actually away, which is why it works differently from turning a notification toggle off: a toggle stays off until you remember to flip it back, while the hold expires by itself and leaves every one of your notification preferences exactly as you set them.

The hold is yours alone. It quiets email to you, not to anyone else on your account, and it changes nothing inside the app itself: your Feed, your decisions, and your signals keep updating the whole time, so the moment you are back, the app is current and your inbox has not spent a week piling up.

Where to find it

Open Settings from the sidebar, then in the Account group click Notifications, or go directly to /settings/notifications. Pause notifications is the first section on the page, sitting above the notification switches. Its caption reads: "Going on vacation or PTO? Put your recurring updates on hold. They resume on their own when you're back. Billing, security, and account notices still reach you."

The same control appears everywhere you can reach notification settings: in the mobile app under Settings, then Notifications, and for HQ seats on the HQ side's own Settings, Notifications page (web and mobile), where the caption's closing line reads "Account and billing notices still reach you." It is one setting per person, so setting a hold on your phone and checking it later on the web shows the same hold.

Setting a hold

1. 1Pick a preset, or pick a date. Two preset buttons, 1 week and 2 weeks, start a hold the moment you press one. If neither fits, use "Or until a specific date": a date picker whose earliest allowed date is tomorrow, followed by a Pause button that starts the hold on the day you chose.
2. 2The hold covers your chosen day in full. Whichever way you set it, the hold runs to the end of that final day in your local time and lifts overnight, so a "1 week" hold resumes the morning after the seventh day. A full week off reads as a full week off.
3. 3There is no step three. The hold saves immediately, there is no confirmation screen, and nothing needs to be undone later: when the return date passes, email simply starts arriving again on whatever preferences you already had.

If a save fails, the control reverts and shows the error under the section. A date that is not in the future is rejected with "Pick a date in the future" rather than being saved as a hold that does nothing.

While a hold is active

The section swaps its controls for a banner reading "Paused until [date]" (for example, "Paused until Mon, Jul 28"), with the line "Recurring updates are on hold. Billing, security, and account notices still reach you." beside a Resume now button. Press Resume now and the hold clears immediately, no waiting for the date. If you let it run, the hold ends on its own at the end of your chosen day and the banner is gone the next time you look.

What is held, and what always arrives

The hold covers the recurring and proactive mail, the classes of email that can wait a week:

• The recurring digests, your daily digest and the weekly summary.
• IQ's own outbound emails: the topical observations and the real-time notes IQ sends when something material lands.
• The onboarding email cadence, if your account is still in its first weeks.
• On an HQ seat, the weekly briefing: while your hold is active, the briefing run skips you and picks you back up after your return date.

Some email is deliberately exempt, because missing it for a week could cost you money or lock you out: billing and payment notices, security email, verification links, and account notices always arrive, hold or no hold. That is the promise in the caption's last line, and it means setting a hold before a trip never silently swallows a card-failure notice or a sign-in verification you asked for.

Per seat, email only

The hold is scoped to you as a person on the account, not to the account itself. If a teammate shares your Verinode account, your hold does not touch their email, and theirs does not touch yours: each seat pauses independently. And because the hold gates only outbound email, nothing else changes: data keeps flowing in, IQ keeps working, decisions keep surfacing in the Feed, and in-app notifications behave exactly as before. What you are pausing is your inbox, not your business.

How it differs from the other quiet controls

Verinode has several ways of keeping email in check, and they answer different questions:

• Quiet hours are a nightly window: IQ holds its event-driven sends overnight (8:00 PM through 7:00 AM by default, your local time), every day, forever. The vacation hold is the opposite shape: whole days at a time, with a defined end.
• The per-day cap is a ceiling, not a stop: past a set number of IQ emails in a day, further ones queue silently instead of sending. On a heavy day it thins the stream; it never empties it. The hold empties it.
• Turning a toggle off on the Notifications page is permanent until you reverse it, and it removes one category of email for good. The hold is temporary and total across the recurring classes: everything pausable stops, everything comes back on its own, and your toggles are untouched throughout.

The practical rule: for a trip, use the hold; for "I never want this category," use the toggle; and let quiet hours and the cap do their standing work either way.

Best-practice example

Say you are taking the first week of August off. On your last afternoon, open Settings, Notifications, and press 1 week. The banner confirms "Paused until" the Sunday you get back, and from that evening your digests, IQ's notes, and the rest of the recurring stream stop. Mid-week, a card on file fails: that billing notice still reaches you, because money and account mail is exempt. The Monday you are back, there is no switch to remember, the hold lifted overnight on its own, your digest arrives at its usual hour, and the app has been current the entire time.

Data sources