Content Source
Most emails say exactly what you put in them. A few can't. The thing that makes them worth sending only exists at the moment they go out — what a shopper left in their cart, which products suit this particular person, the order number your fulfillment system generated thirty seconds ago.
Content Source is where you tell Paminga which kind of email this is. You choose it when you create the email, and it decides two things: what gets seeded into your starting layout, and what Paminga goes looking for when the email sends.
Content Source Is Not Dynamic Content
These sound alike and do genuinely different jobs, so it's worth separating them before anything else.
Dynamic Content shows and hides parts of an email you have already built. You build a Section, a Row, or an Element, attach conditions to it, and each recipient sees it or doesn't.
Content Source decides where the content comes from in the first place. It's the difference between "hide this block from people in Canada" and "fill this block with whatever was in their cart."
They stack. An Abandoned Cart email can use Dynamic Content freely, and so can any other kind. Choosing a Content Source never limits what else you can do with the email.
The Options
The Email Itself
The default, and the right answer for the large majority of email you send. Everything the recipient sees is what you built in the builder.
That is not the same as "the same email for everyone." Personalized fields, Dynamic Content, persona conditions, and internationalization all work exactly as they always do. The content still varies per person — it just varies using what Paminga already knows, rather than something handed to it at send time.
Abandoned Cart
The email carries a cart composition. You control the layout, the styling, and the copy around it; the cart contents themselves come from your online store.
The cart fills only when an Abandoned Cart Automation is what sends the email. Sent any other way — a Send It, an ordinary workflow — there's no cart to read and the block comes out empty. Content Source and the automation have to agree.
Product Recommendations
The same shape, with recommendations in place of a cart. Your systems decide what to recommend and send it over an authenticated webhook; Paminga renders it inside the email you designed.
The same pairing rule applies: recommendations arrive only when a Product Recommendation Automation sends the email.
API Payload
The open-ended one. Rather than a cart or a recommendation set, you place tokens whose keys you name yourself — orderNumber, trackingUrl, whatever your systems already call these things — and supply the values in the API call that sends the email.
Use it when the value you need doesn't fit any of the shapes above and doesn't live in Paminga. See Payload Emails.
API Payload is an internal Paminga feature for now. It won't appear in the list on a customer account, and there's no per-account switch to enable it.
Where You'll Find It
Content Source appears in the Create an Email dialog when you're building a Drag & Drop email and starting from scratch.
It's deliberately absent from the other paths. Starting from a template spreads that template's layout wholesale, so the cart or recommendation block never gets seeded — you'd end up with an email marked as an Abandoned Cart that has no cart in it. The AI and import paths build an ordinary email for the same reason.
The Choice Is Permanent
Content Source can't be changed after the email is created, and cloning an email carries it along.
There's no safe default to fall back on. Pick wrong in either direction and the fix is a new email and a rebuild — an ordinary email can never start reading a cart, and the choice isn't editable afterward.
So decide it the way you'd decide anything permanent: by what's going to send the email. If an outside system feeds it, the Content Source has to match the automation that triggers it. If nothing feeds it, it's The Email Itself.
The name is the cheapest place to record this. An email called "Spring Sale — Product Recs" tells the next person what they're looking at before they open it, which matters more than usual for a setting they can't see from the list and can't change.
