Pause, Clear or Cancel Queued DMs
Two buttons sit beside the rate in the In queue panel: pause, which holds delivery, and the red clear, which empties the queue. They sound similar and are not — one delays messages, the other cancels them.
Before you begin
- An Instagram account connected to LinktoDM
- The account whose queue you want with In queue expanded in the console sidebar
Pause delivery
Section titled “Pause delivery”Click the pause button next to the rate. Delivery stops, and the panel says so until you start it again.
Press the green play button to resume. Everything that piled up meanwhile goes out from there.
Pausing stops delivery, not your automations. Triggers keep matching and messages keep landing in the queue behind the pause, so the count grows while it’s held — nothing is lost, it’s only late.
That makes pause the right control for a short, deliberate hold: you’ve spotted a typo in a published DM, or you’re mid-edit on an automation and don’t want the old version going out for the next few minutes. Fix the thing, then resume.
Clear the queue
Section titled “Clear the queue”The red trash button empties the queue. Everything waiting — DMs and scheduled follow-ups alike — is dropped and will not be sent.
Reach for it when the queue holds messages you actively don’t want delivered: a mistake published to a post that took off, or an automation that matched far more comments than you meant it to.
Two things to know before you press it:
- It can’t be undone. A cleared message isn’t rescheduled or retried. The people waiting on it simply never hear back, and a comment that expected a DM goes unanswered.
- It doesn’t switch anything off. Clearing empties what’s there right now. A live automation starts filling the queue again with the next comment, so if the automation itself is the problem, turn it off first and clear second — otherwise you’re clearing a queue that’s refilling behind you.
Which one you want
Section titled “Which one you want”| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Hold messages for a few minutes and send them after | Pause, then play |
| Stop one automation sending, permanently | Switch that automation off |
| Keep the public replies but stop the DMs | Disable the DM step |
| Cancel messages that are already waiting | Clear (after switching the automation off) |
You should now have
A queue you can hold and release on purpose — paused while you fix something, cleared when what’s waiting shouldn’t go out at all, and the automations behind it switched off first so it stays that way.