Why your DM did not send

Almost every silent automation comes down to one of five things. This is the order the engine checks them in, so work down the list and stop at the first No.

A DM that never arrives feels like a broken product, and it almost never is. There is a specific list of conditions every send has to clear, and one of them is usually sitting at No.

1. Is the campaign Active?

By far the most common cause. Campaigns save as Draft, and both Draft and Paused send nothing at all — no DM, no public reply, no log entry. Open the campaign and check the status at the top.

2. Did their comment actually match your keyword?

Matching is on the word you set. If your keyword is GUIDE and they typed guide me the link, whether that matches depends on your keyword settings rather than on their intent — and people mistype constantly.

• •Check the comment on Instagram itself rather than trusting your memory of it.
• •If real people keep missing, the keyword is too long or too easy to misspell. Shorten it.
• •Turn on Any keyword to confirm the rest of the campaign works, then decide whether to keep it on.

3. Is the Instagram account still connected?

Open Accounts. If the card shows a red Token expired or invalid strip, nothing has been sending since it appeared. Press Refresh Token, and reconnect the account if that does not clear it. This is silent by design on Instagram's side, which is why it is worth checking early.

4. Do you have DMs left this month?

Free plans include a fixed number of DMs a month, and sends stop when it runs out rather than queueing. The current allowance for each plan is on the pricing page, and your usage is on the dashboard.

5. Has the person opted out?

Anyone who replies STOP is opted out, and IGSender will not message them again from that account. This is deliberate and not reversible from your side — it is what keeps automated messaging within Instagram's rules and keeps your account safe.

Everything passes and it still did not send

Two quieter mechanisms can hold sends back, both of them protecting your account rather than failing.

• •Rate-limit back-off. If Instagram rate-limits your account, IGSender waits and retries with an increasing delay rather than hammering the API, which is what gets accounts restricted.
• •Automatic pause. After repeated send failures the account is paused and you get an email about it. One clean send clears it.

Instagram also only lets a business reply to a comment for a limited window after it was posted. A very old comment on a very old post may simply be out of time, which is why re-triggering past commenters is a separate feature rather than something that happens by itself.