Three Email Types Now Ignore Do Not Disturb in HighLevel. Its Own Docs Say DND Gets Set by Spam Complaints.

August 6, 2026. HighLevel changed how Do Not Disturb works on August 4, and it is the kind of change that arrives as a one paragraph improvement note and lands in your compliance posture. Three email types are no longer skipped when a contact is marked DND. If you have ever treated DND as the hard stop in a client account, this is worth ten minutes today.

What changed on August 4

1. The entry is dated August 4, 2026 on HighLevel's changelog, filed under Email System and Contacts, and titled "Some email types are now exempted from DND."
2. Three types are exempt: payments and invoices, calendar notifications, and system notifications.
3. HighLevel's stated reason is that these are transactional and time sensitive rather than marketing, and that blocking them meant important information could go undelivered.
4. The scope is explicitly narrow. HighLevel notes that all marketing and promotional email continues to respect DND, and that this is not a blanket bypass.

The overlap HighLevel has not addressed in writing

Read that change next to HighLevel's own Do Not Disturb documentation, which is where it gets interesting. That article states that email DND is switched on automatically when a contact unsubscribes, marks an email as spam, or when there are permanent failures like bounces.

So email DND is not only a preference somebody set. On a mature account it is also a bucket that fills with spam complainers and dead addresses, populated by the system rather than by a person. Three email types now reach that bucket. Sending to an address that hard bounced is a deliverability problem for your sending domain. Sending to someone who filed a spam complaint is a reputation problem you cannot see from inside the CRM.

Two things are genuinely unresolved, and it is worth being precise about that rather than assuming the worst. HighLevel's DND article separately references suppression lists, which suggests bounce handling may live in a layer that still applies after DND is bypassed. And the changelog does not say whether the exemption respects the reason DND was set. Neither question has a published answer, so the correct move is to put it to HighLevel support in writing rather than to guess. Three lines from HighLevel would settle it: whether suppression is evaluated independently of DND, whether an exempt email is still blocked for a hard bounced address, and whether the exemption distinguishes a contact who unsubscribed from one who filed a spam complaint.

What it means for operators

The immediate action is inventory, not panic. Pull the contacts in your client accounts with email DND enabled and look at why. HighLevel shows attribution for DND changes in Conversations and activity logs, including whether a workflow, a user, or the contact themselves set it, so the reason is usually recoverable. A list dominated by workflow driven or system driven DND is a different risk profile from one where people clicked unsubscribe.

Then decide, per client, whether the exemption is what you want. For a services business chasing unpaid invoices it plainly is. For an account in a regulated vertical, or one where a contact was marked DND after a complaint, silence may be the safer default, and that is a conversation to have with the client before an invoice reminder lands in a complainer's inbox.

The broader point is that platform defaults change underneath you and nobody sends a memo. Vendors publish these notes in changelogs most agency owners never open, and the ones that touch consent and deliverability rarely look dramatic on the page. Keeping a client's HighLevel build aligned with what the platform actually does now is ongoing work, not a setup task, and it sits directly alongside the sender reputation discipline that decides whether outbound email reaches an inbox at all.