Scribble glossary

The words Scribble uses, defined. The two worth learning first: a credit is one card, and an arrival window is a range of days, never a promised delivery date.

Arrival window: The range of days a card is expected to land in. Three calendar days by default, or a single day if you asked for an exact date. Never a promise. See arrival windows.
Automation: An evergreen rule that creates cards on its own, on a daily schedule. See how automations work.
Campaign: A batch of cards you build and schedule yourself, through the seven-step wizard.
Card code: The identifier for one physical card, like SC-NH4DERB. Six payload characters plus a check character, in an alphabet with no I, L, O or U so it cannot be misread aloud. It follows the card through production and appears on the back cover and the envelope.
Catch-up window: How many previous days an automation run re-checks, so a missed run does not lose anybody. Defaults to 7 and cannot cause a duplicate.
Credit: One card, including the card, the envelope, the writing and US postage. Bought outright, never expires. See how credits work.
Design: The artwork on the front of a card plus the layout of the inside, saved together and reusable.
Do-not-mail list: People and households nobody in your company can write to. Survives a re-import recreating a contact you deleted. See do-not-mail.
Held: A card that needs a person before it can be made, almost always because the address cannot be written on an envelope. A held card is never charged. Appears as blocked in the API.
House handwriting: Your organisation's default handwriting style. Every campaign inherits it unless it picks its own.
Inbound hook: A URL that sends one card every time something POSTs JSON to it. The token in the URL is the credential. See inbound hooks.
Lead time (days ahead): How far in advance of a date an automation creates the card. Defaults to 5, which is too short; use at least 10.
List: A saved group of contacts that an automation watches. Campaigns cannot point at a list yet.
Merge field: A placeholder like {{first_name}} replaced per recipient. See merge fields.
Occurrence: One instance of a date an automation acts on: this year's birthday for this person. The unit the duplicate guard is keyed on.
Physical proof: A real card, actually written and posted to you, before a run goes out. Offered on the review step of a campaign.
Posted: Handed to USPS. The point at which a card leaves Scribble's control.
Printed: In Scribble, this word only ever describes the artwork on the card stock. Nothing about the handwriting is printed.
Return address: Your organisation's address, written on the back of every envelope. Required before any campaign can go out, because undeliverable US mail with no return address is destroyed rather than returned.
Scope: What an API key is allowed to do: cards:send, cards:read, contacts:read, contacts:write.
Suppression: The technical name for an entry on the do-not-mail list.
Unverified: The status every address carries. Scribble checks the shape of an address, not whether post arrives there.
Written: What Scribble does to a card: a machine holds a real pen and drags it across paper. The correct word for our output in every context.

Last checked against the product on 2026-08-05. Something wrong or missing? Tell us.