Once you switch reminders on, KehillaHQ emails each family before the yahrzeit they are remembering. You do not schedule anything. It runs every day and works out who is due.
Turning reminders on
Reminders are off until you turn them on, in Settings, then Yahrzeit.
This is deliberate. It gives you time to get your records right before your community receives anything, and it means an import cannot accidentally email two hundred families the moment it finishes.
Check your records before switching this on. In particular, confirm that Hebrew-calendar records are set to the Hebrew calendar, and look for recipients with no email address. Once reminders are on, they go out on the next daily run.
How far ahead
Set the lead time in the same place. The default is seven days before the observance.
You can set more than one. With seven and thirty days configured, a family gets a note a month ahead and another the week of. Each lead time sends once per year per record, so nobody is emailed twice for the same milestone.
When it runs
Once a day, early morning UTC. There is no button to make it run now, and no need to check on it.
Who receives a reminder
The reminder goes to the recipient on the record: either the linked member’s email address, or the contact entered directly on the record for someone who is not a member.
A reminder is not sent when:
- There is no email address. The most common reason a family hears nothing.
- The linked member is Archived or Deceased. The system will not email a person who has died, or an archived record. Inactive members do still receive reminders.
- That address has unsubscribed. See When someone unsubscribes.
Each of these shows on the record as a status you can see at a glance and filter the list by: No email, Opted out, and so on. See Checking whether a reminder went out.
The Archived and Deceased rule only applies to linked members. A remembrance contact entered directly on the record is never skipped for this reason, because the system has no member status to check.
The catch-up window
This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes reminders trustworthy.
Reminders are not sent on one exact day. A record becomes due at its lead time and stays due until it is sent. If the daily run does not happen one day, for any reason, the next run picks up everything that was waiting and sends it.
It matters because of what the alternative does. If reminders only fired on the exact day, then a single missed run would silently skip every record whose day fell in that gap, and skip them for the whole year. Nobody would notice until a family asked why they were not told. The window means a missed day costs a small delay, not a whole year.
Two consequences worth knowing:
A record you add late still sends. Enter a yahrzeit whose observance is four days away, with a seven-day lead time, and it goes out on the next daily run rather than waiting until next year.
A reminder can arrive slightly later than the lead time suggests. With a seven-day lead time, a reminder is sent seven days ahead in the ordinary case, and a little closer to the date if there was a delay. It arrives before the observance, which is the point.
What the email contains
The name of the person being remembered, their Hebrew name where recorded, their relationship to the family, and the date of the observance.
If your congregation has set a calendar link or a donation link in Settings, those appear too. If you have not set them, they are simply left out, with no empty buttons.
The sender name and reply-to address come from your yahrzeit settings. Set the reply-to to an address a person actually reads, because families do reply to these.
If something goes wrong
Failed sends are recorded on the record itself, and a summary of any failures is sent to KehillaHQ so we see problems without you having to report them.
If a family tells you they did not receive a reminder, open the record and look at its history. It will tell you whether the reminder was sent, skipped, or failed, and why. 