The messages that must arrive, and the ones you can turn off

Communications are usually an afterthought — a confirmation email and a reminder, written once, in a template nobody has read since launch. Then a venue changes at short notice and it turns out there is no message for that.

Defined rather than improvised

Over a hundred communication events are specified across thirteen categories, each with its audience, its channels, its severity and its trigger. Ticket issued, payment failed, event postponed, venue changed, payout sent, refund processed, presale opening, door opening — each is a defined event rather than something someone writes in a hurry when it first happens.

Channels, chosen per message

Which channels carry a given message is part of its definition, not a global preference. A venue change one hour before doors goes everywhere available; a monthly summary is email only.

What actually leaves the building

Two channels deliver today: email, over SMTP, and in-app, which appears in the bell in your header the moment it is written. Push and WhatsApp are defined in the catalogue and are not delivered — a message routed only to them is recorded as suppressed rather than reported as sent. Saying which is which matters more than the count: a delivery log that claims success is worse than no log at all when a customer is telling you their ticket never arrived.

Sixty-one are mandatory

Some messages cannot be switched off, and the boundary is not arbitrary: it is whether the message is part of the transaction. Your ticket. A refund. A cancellation. A change of venue or time. A security event on your account. You did not consent to marketing when you bought a ticket, and you did not opt out of being told the venue moved.

Delivery of a ticket is the product

A completed payment with no ticket delivered is indistinguishable from fraud from where the buyer is standing. So ticket delivery is treated as a transactional guarantee with retries and failure alerting, not as an email that usually works.

Marketing is genuinely optional

Recommendations, announcements and organiser newsletters are opt-out per category, and turning them off never affects anything transactional. An unsubscribe that quietly stops your tickets arriving is a dark pattern, and reserving the right to do it is why so many people distrust the checkbox.