First outreach to a prospect, end to end

The flow#

1. Trigger — a person sends from the prospect, an outreach sequence reaches its first step, or the Assistant is asked to write to a qualified prospect.
2. User event — the decision to contact this organisation, recorded against whoever or whatever made it.
3. Authentication and workspace resolution — the workspace is entered before the mailbox, the suppression list or the allowance is read.
4. Ingest — the prospect, its address and its provenance, and the mailbox that will send.
5. Canonical record — the intended message exists as a draft on a thread before any provider is involved, so a refusal has somewhere to be written.
6. Reasoning — the opening is written from claims that carry evidence, not from the model's impression of the company.
7. Knowledge, memory and rules — workspace knowledge, standing instructions, and directives such as a block: tag on the contact are applied before the draft is offered.
8. Autonomy and approval — the channel's mode decides: autonomous sends within the gates, ask_before_send puts it in Needs You, draft_only writes it and stops, off does not draft at all.
9. Action through a provider — the send goes through the shared boundary in outbound.py, the same one a person's own send uses.
10. Result — sent with the provider's acknowledgement, held, refused, or *uncertain* while no acknowledgement has arrived.
11. Relationship and timeline — the message appears on the prospect and, once a Person exists, on that person's timeline.
12. Audit, usage and Needs You — the send is counted against the daily allowance, the decision is logged with its rule, and anything unresolved is queued.

The five gates#

What counts as sent#

A message is sent when the provider has acknowledged it, and not a moment earlier. Between handing the message over and receiving that acknowledgement the state is *uncertain*, which is a real state with its own handling rather than an optimistic guess. Recording a send before the provider agrees produces the worst kind of record: one that says a customer was written to when they were not.

1. Approve, or let an autonomous send run.

   Result The message goes through outbound.py — the same boundary a person uses, so switching who sends does not switch the rules.

2. Wait for the acknowledgement.

   Result Sent, with evidence. The evidence is what the timeline shows, not an assumption from the absence of an error.

3. If no acknowledgement arrives, read the uncertain state rather than resending.

   Result A blind resend is how a prospect receives the same introduction twice, which is worse than a delay.

Failures worth recognising#

Nothing was drafted

The channel's autonomy is off, or the prospect has no address at all — in which case the next action was never email.

Drafted, never offered

draft_only. It writes and deliberately does not ask, which is not the same as ask_before_send.

Refused at compliance

Suppression, unsubscribe or do-not-contact. The origin is shown; a do-not-contact entry is not cleared casually and the Assistant cannot clear one at all.

Held for days

The allowance, usually. Approval is recorded and the send waits rather than failing.

Sent to the wrong mailbox

The mailbox is chosen by role and by the thread, not by the person approving, which is why it is not editable in the approval.

Questions#

Related#

• First outreach
• Sender readiness
• The compliance check before outreach
• Outreach was blocked
• Proof that a message was sent
• What Connect may do