An outreach sequence, end to end

First contact to stop#

1. Trigger — a qualified prospect with a contactable address, reached by research rather than by guesswork.
2. User or external event — a person, or the Assistant, starts the sequence; nothing is sent to a stranger without somebody choosing to.
3. Authentication and workspace resolution — the sequence runs inside one workspace, and the sending mailbox is one of that workspace's own.
4. Ingest — the prospect record, its evidence and the angle the research produced are loaded together.
5. Canonical record — the outreach lives as messages on a thread against a contact, exactly like any other conversation, so a reply has somewhere to land.
6. Research and reasoning — the message is written from the evidence held about that organisation, not from a template with a name substituted into it.
7. Knowledge, memory and rules — a block:email directive on the contact ends the sequence before a word is written, and it holds on every future conversation too.
8. Autonomy and approval — a cold first contact is the case most workspaces hold. Under ask_before_send it becomes an approval; the sender's readiness is checked before it goes.
9. Compliance and the provider — suppression, unsubscribe, complaints and do-not-contact are all checked in one place, and only then does outbound.py send.
10. Result — sent with provider evidence, held, or refused with the reason recorded.
11. Relationship, timeline and memory — the attempt is on the organisation's record whether or not anybody answers, so the next person to look knows it happened.
12. Audit, usage and Needs You — the send is metered, the decision is logged, a reply is queued for a person, and a refusal is logged as a decision rather than swallowed.

The gates, and what each one refuses#

Why a reply leaves the sequence#

The moment somebody answers, the work stops being outreach and becomes a conversation. Connect treats that as a change of path, not a change of stage. Outreach email and a customer reply run on separate paths with different gates, and they are never merged — which is the reason a reply is not answered by the next message in a sequence.

The practical difference is what each path is allowed to assume. Outreach is unsolicited and is gated on evidence, consent and suppression before anything is written. A reply is solicited: the person chose to write, and the gates that matter are the ordinary ones — autonomy, the daily allowance, and whatever memory says about them. Merging the two would either strangle replies with cold-outreach checks or let a sequence inherit a reply's permission to keep writing.

A positive reply

Handled on the conversation path, with the prospect's research already attached to the person. Where it changes the commercial picture, from an email to an opportunity is the next step.

A negative reply

The sequence stops. Whether the address is suppressed as well depends on what the reply asked for; a refusal to buy is not an unsubscribe.

An unsubscribe

A suppression, immediately, on the path described in an unsubscribe request.

A bounce or a complaint

Handled as its own flow, because both say something about the address rather than about the person's interest.

Silence

The sequence continues to its own stop condition, and the attempts stay on the organisation's record.

What outreach may not do here#

• It may not invent an address. A contact reaches a sequence with evidence behind it or not at all, which is the difference between low-volume outreach that works and bulk mail that damages a domain.
• It may not bypass the send boundary. Cold mail goes through outbound.py like everything else, so it is metered, suppression-checked and recorded with the provider's acknowledgement.
• It may not re-approach a do-not-contact entry, and the Assistant cannot clear one on your behalf.
• It may not treat an uncertain send as a failure and try again — that is how one stranger receives the same cold message twice.

The honest limit worth stating: deliverability is not a setting inside Connect. What Connect controls is who is contacted, on what evidence, how often, and with what recorded consent. Whether a message reaches an inbox also depends on the sending domain's own reputation and authentication, which live with the mail host.

Questions#

Related#

• Outreach email versus a customer reply
• First outreach
• The compliance check before outreach
• Stopping a cold sequence
• The suppression list
• An unsubscribe request, end to end
• Connect does not guess email addresses
• Evidence-first prospecting without guessed emails