OK, I see. this actually has to do with when the IFTTT ‘program start’ notification is sent out. Specifically, as soon as a program is scheduled, the ‘program start’ notification will be sent out. The rain sensor status gets applied at per-zone level. The reason it’s implemented this way is that a program may contain many zones, some of them observe rain sensor status, while others may ignore rain sensor (note that ‘ignore rain’ is a per-zone attribute). As a result, a program will be scheduled as usual, and whether a zone actually runs or not depends on its ‘ignore rain’ attribute. That explains why ‘program start’ notification is always sent out, even if no zone ends up running. I agree that this is not ideal, and will check what we can do to improve it.