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Sandbox: turning cron on can send real emails
When you create a sandbox, two things start switched off on purpose:
- Scheduled tasks (cron) are off, so a test copy doesn't fire real-world actions on a schedule.
- Outbound email is off, so the sandbox can't send messages to your real customers.
This is the safe default — but it has a sharp edge when you turn cron back on.
What goes wrong
A sandbox is a full copy of your live store, so it also carries a copy of every scheduled job you had configured — newsletter sends, abandoned-cart reminders, order-status notifications, syncs to outside systems, and so on.
The moment you enable cron to get indexing and price updates working, those jobs become eligible to run too. Depending on how a given job or extension sends mail, that can mean real messages going out from a test store — to real customers.
What to do
- Before enabling cron, review your scheduled tasks and remove or disable any that send email or reach outside systems — newsletters, reminders, third-party integrations, payment captures. Keep only the internal maintenance jobs you actually need, such as reindexing and cache management.
- Then enable cron in the portal.
- Treat anything that talks to the outside world as suspect until you've confirmed it points at a test endpoint, not production.
Related
A sandbox also carries your real payment configuration. Even with cron off, a manual test checkout can reach your live payment provider — switch the sandbox to your provider's test/sandbox mode before running any test orders.
See Testing changes in a sandbox for the full picture of what a sandbox is and how it behaves.