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Hypothetically, if you schedule a send to go out, but make changes to the HTML and Audience/Exclusion Data Extensions associated (ie: have it refresh), does it send out the changes, or only what was done prior to scheduling?

My assumption is that scheduling only puts a timestamp for an automation and then takes the most recent saved information, but just making sure. Thanks!

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EDIT (as of 5/18/2020)

There has been a shift in how this works, so I wanted to adjust this answer to the correct information now. (Thanks for @James Sullivan and @Leto for bringing this to my attention).

BOTH User-Initiated Sends and Triggered Sends will not adjust any content inside of the email once the send job has been initiated. So, simply put:

  1. User-Initiated Send/UI Send: Once you schedule your Send or Push 'Send Immediately' a 'snapshot' of the email content is taken to help make the actual send later much quicker (think of how website 'caching' works. Same theory here). This means any edits made to the email AFTER the job is created and queued, will require you to cancel the existing send and recreate it.
  2. Triggered Send: Once you have started/published your Trigger Send, a 'snapshot' of the content inside the email has been taken. This means any changes will require you to pause, republish and then restart your trigger for this to take effect.

To expand on 'Snapshot', I mean that all content, including references to internal content (via AMPscript/SSJS [ContentBlockBy... functions] or the 'Reference Block' in the UI) and some external content (there are exceptions to this depending on what is used).

So changing a content block that is referenced by ContentBlockByID after the send job has been set will NOT change the content used for that block in that email job.

To expand on @TastyBurgers answer, it can be both depending on how you send the email.

An User Initiated Send and the Send Flow/Guided Send scheduled send (usually done through the UI) pull the most recent version of the email with the Email ID that was assigned to it. It will also send to the most recent data inside the list/data extension(s) assigned to it.

The Triggered Send Interaction will only send to the last published email creative, meaning if you edit the email creative assigned to the Trigger but never publish the changes, it will continue sending to the old version.

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    I know this is an old thread, but want to leaving a note for other people googling this issue and arrive here: This is unfortunately not 100% true any more. I have one instance of ExactTarget/MarketingCloud that has 150 future scheduled sends that are going out with old content and old footers. Salesforce.com support said that it's expected behavior and we need to reschedule them to get the latest content included.
    – James Sullivan
    Oct 5, 2018 at 9:30
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    I want to reinforce the @JamesSullivan comment, for anyone who is searching. I had the same problem, one email was Scheduled (an User Initiated Send) and some user changed the content, but when reached the Schedule time the email was sent with the old content.
    – Leto
    May 18, 2020 at 14:56

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