Sequences

Rolling out

Sequences is a release-flagged feature, and it is not offered on aglyn.com-hosted workspaces. It is available on self-hosted installs, where the install's own staff switch it on — see Self-hosted installs.

What it is for

Sequences is for one-to-one selling. A rep writes a short sequence — a first email and the follow-ups after it, each a set number of days apart — and enrolls people from the CRM in it. Every email goes to one person, as a message from the rep rather than as a campaign.

It is not a way to send one message to an audience. That is what email campaigns are for, sent from your site's sending identity to a segment of your contacts.

Sent from your own mailbox

A sequence sends from the rep's own mailbox, connected to the workspace through the rep's Google account or Microsoft 365 account. The email leaves from that address, sits in that rep's sent mail like any other, and a reply comes back to the same inbox — which is what makes it a conversation between two people rather than a broadcast.

Where it lives

Sequences is a tab of its own at the organization level, beside the CRM. It has three sections: All sequences, Mailboxes and Compliance.

Opening it takes the Use Sequences permission, which owners and admins hold by default. A custom role can grant it to other members of the organization. A collaborator added to particular sites cannot open it, because Sequences covers the whole organization.

Self-hosted installs

A self-hosted install runs Sequences with a Google OAuth client of its own, a Microsoft Entra app registration of its own, or both:

1. Create the OAuth client in Google Cloud and set GOOGLE_OUTREACH_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_OUTREACH_CLIENT_SECRET and OUTREACH_TOKEN_KEY on the console. Environment variables gives each value, the redirect URI to register and the scopes the grant asks for. For Microsoft 365 mailboxes, register the app in Microsoft Entra and set MICROSOFT_OUTREACH_CLIENT_ID and MICROSOFT_OUTREACH_CLIENT_SECRET; its section lists the permissions and the redirect URI.
2. Make the consent screen Internal, on a Google Cloud project owned by your own Google Workspace organization. An Internal screen lets that organization's users connect their mailboxes without Google's app verification or its security assessment. Only accounts in that Workspace organization can connect; a mailbox outside it would need an External screen, which Google has to verify first.
3. As a staff account on your install, turn Sequences on for the organization that will use it: grant the Sequences entitlement and the release_outreach flag in the entitlement editor, or turn release_outreach on for every organization under Feature flags.

Connect a mailbox

Each rep connects their own Google or Microsoft 365 mailbox in Sequences → Mailboxes:

1. Select Connect with Google or Connect with Microsoft and choose your account.
2. Google or Microsoft asks you to let Aglyn send email on your behalf and read your email. Allow both. Sending is how a sequence's messages go out as you; reading is how a reply or a bounce is noticed, so a sequence stops when somebody answers. If either is left unticked, the connection is refused and nothing is saved.
3. You come back to Mailboxes with the mailbox listed as Active.

The access granted is stored encrypted and is never shown to anyone, administrators included. Connecting the same account again updates the mailbox you already have and keeps its settings. Each member can connect up to ten mailboxes.

A Microsoft 365 mailbox sends through Microsoft Graph. Each email is written the same way a Google mailbox writes it — the same footer, the same unsubscribe link, the same tracked links — and a follow-up answers the earlier email, so it lands in the same conversation for the person you wrote to. A Microsoft account's administrator may need to approve the app for the organization before its members can connect.

If Mailboxes says the Google account does not have Gmail turned on, the account exists but Gmail is not running for it yet. A Google Workspace user created that day can take up to a day before Gmail is ready; otherwise the Workspace administrator turns Gmail on for the account. Then connect again. Nothing was saved by the attempt that was refused.

If Mailboxes says connecting a Google or Microsoft 365 mailbox isn't configured, your deployment has no OAuth client set up for that provider. On a self-hosted install, see Environment variables.

Send-as address and display name

A Microsoft 365 mailbox sends as its own address. A Google mailbox sends as one address: the account's own, or an alias Gmail has already verified for it — one added under Settings → Accounts → Send mail as in Gmail and confirmed there. Only addresses Gmail lists as verified are offered. To use a new alias, add it in Gmail first, then connect the mailbox again so the new alias is seen.

If the same address is waiting for verification under Your sending addresses, connecting the mailbox verifies it there too, because Gmail has already confirmed you can send as it.

The display name is the name recipients see beside the address.

Daily cap, warm-up and sending window

• Daily cap — the most the mailbox sends in one day. It starts at 20 and can be set up to 100.
• Warm-up — a newly connected mailbox ramps up: at most 10 a day in its first week, 20 in its second and 30 from its third. The daily cap still applies, so a mailbox capped at 20 never sends more than 20. Warm up gradually is on for every new connection; the member who owns the mailbox can switch it off for one that has sent mail for years and already has its reputation, and it then sends at its cap from that day. Switching it back on starts a fresh ramp.
• Sending window — the days of the week and the hours the mailbox sends in, read in the mailbox's timezone. A message that comes due outside the window waits for the next opening.

Google Workspace itself allows each user 2,000 messages and 2,000 unique external recipients a day, aliases included; the caps here keep a mailbox far below that.

Status and health

Status	What it means
Active	The mailbox can send.
Paused	Somebody paused it, or it paused itself — see below. Nothing sends from it until it is resumed.
Reconnect required	Google or Microsoft stopped accepting the connection — the password changed, access was removed from the account, or an administrator revoked it. Nothing sends until you connect the mailbox again. The member who connected it, and the organization's owners and admins, are emailed the moment this happens, with a link to this page.
Disconnected	The mailbox was disconnected. Nothing sends from it until it is connected again.

Health shows the last seven days: messages sent, bounces and replies. A mailbox that has never sent shows zeros and No sends yet. Under it, Tests today counts the tests of a step sent today and, once a member has answered someone, Answers to replies today counts the answers sent from the mailbox — neither counts against the daily cap.

Sender readiness shows SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the domain of the address the mailbox sends as, and whether they align with it — the records receivers use to decide the mail really is yours. Check DNS again reads them fresh. See sender readiness.

When a mailbox pauses itself

Bounces are the first sign that a list has bad addresses in it, and mailbox providers judge a sender by them. So a mailbox pauses itself when:

• two of its emails hard-bounce in the same sending day;
• three of its last 50 emails hard-bounced, once at least 25 of them are in that window — a count, not a rate, so a bounce from two days ago plus one today no longer pauses a mailbox the daily rule already let through, and under the floor a young mailbox is judged by its days alone; or
• a reply called one of its emails spam. That pause is meant to last a week, and the card says when the week is out.

A bounce that is the recipient's mail gateway refusing you counts here like any other, which is why the gateway check in Check people tries to keep it from happening at all.

The card says why, with the date, and a line is written to your organization's activity. The member who connected the mailbox, and the organization's owners and admins, are emailed the moment it pauses: the reason in the mailbox's own words, how many enrollments are waiting on it, and a link to this page. Re-check the addresses in the mailbox's sequences, then select Resume. Only bounces that arrive after you resume are judged again.

Test, pause and disconnect

• Send a test to myself sends a short plain-text message from the mailbox to its own address, so you can check it arrives. Type another address in Test address to send it there instead: a test to your own address never leaves Google or Microsoft, so it carries no authentication result — a test to an outside mailbox you can read is the one whose original source shows whether the send-as domain's DKIM, SPF and DMARC pass. Only the member who connected the mailbox can send one, and at most five an hour.
• Pause stops the mailbox sending; Resume starts it again.
• Disconnect removes the mailbox and deletes its stored access, and tells Google to revoke that access. If another connected mailbox still uses the same Google account — a shared inbox two members connected — the access is left in place for that mailbox. You can always remove access yourself from your Google Account's third-party connections. Microsoft offers no way for an app to revoke its own access, so disconnecting a Microsoft 365 mailbox deletes the stored access, and you remove the app at myapps.microsoft.com to end it at Microsoft too.

Members with the Manage everyone's Sequences permission, which owners and admins hold by default, can change the settings of, pause and disconnect any member's mailbox, send from it, and set up link domains — a departing rep's mailbox has to be stoppable by somebody. Other members manage only their own. A custom role can grant it or take it away.

When a member deletes their account, the mailboxes they connected and the access stored for them are deleted, and Google is asked to revoke it; when an organization is deleted, Google is asked to revoke the access of every mailbox in it. Access another connected mailbox still uses is left in place for that mailbox, as with a disconnect.

Link domains

With Count link clicks on, every link in a sequence email is a short link that counts the click and then takes the reader where you meant. By default it starts with this app's own address. Link domains, under your mailboxes, puts it on your own domain instead: mail sent as you@yourcompany.com carries links that read https://links.yourcompany.com/…, like the rest of the email.

It is the same links. host your campaign email's click tracking uses on a sending domain, set up the same way — one DNS record, then a check:

1. A member holding Manage everyone's Sequences selects Set up beside the domain. The app adds links.yourcompany.com to itself.
2. Publish the record the card shows — a CNAME from links.yourcompany.com to the address it names — at whoever hosts your domain's DNS. The CAA row matters only if your domain already publishes CAA records; if so, add it beside them.
3. Select Check. Once the link domain answers over HTTPS with a valid certificate it reads Verified, and from the next email on, links use it. Until then they keep the app's address, so nothing breaks while DNS spreads.

Links already sent keep working either way: an email sent before the link domain was verified still carries the app's address, and that address keeps answering every link. Remove stops serving the link domain — links already sent on it stop working — so remove one only when nobody will click those emails again.

A domain whose campaign email already tracks clicks on links. through the mail provider cannot also be a sequence link domain; its sequence links keep the app's address. Mailbox providers' own domains, such as gmail.com, are never offered.

Compliance settings

Every email a sequence sends ends with a footer saying who sent it, where they can be reached by post, that the email is a sales email, and how to stop more of them:

Example Co LLC · 100 Example St, Springfield, IL 62701
This is a sales email from Example Co. Not interested? Reply "no" and I won't email again.

The United States' CAN-SPAM Act requires those things of a commercial email, so the footer is added to every email after your text — no template or merge field can leave it off. You set what it says in Sequences → Compliance:

• Legal name — your organization's legal name, as the footer prints it.
• Brand name — the name the solicitation sentence uses, when it isn't the legal name. Leave it empty to use the legal name.
• Postal address — a valid physical postal address: a street address, a post office box registered with the US Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with the US Postal Service under its rules for commercial mail receiving agencies. Write it over as many lines as it takes; the footer prints them on one line.

No sequence can be activated while the legal name or the postal address is empty, and an email with neither is never sent.

Allowed countries

The countries a sequence may send to at all, United States by default. Every sequence sends only to the countries both it and this list allow, so taking a country off here takes it off every sequence at once.

The others are off because the law is different there. Canada, the United Kingdom and most of the European Union require a consent basis that an email to someone who never contacted you does not have. So a cold email — to someone who never filled in a form, signed up, ordered or booked with you, or wrote to you — never goes outside the United States, whatever this list says. Add another country only for people who came to you first.

Do not contact domains

The domains no sequence emails anyone at, whoever enrolls them. Your organization's do-not-contact list holds addresses — a person who replied "no", used the unsubscribe link, or was marked do-not-contact on an enrollment — and, beside them, whole domains:

• Add one yourself — a company that asked not to hear from you, or one whose mail gateway you know blocks you. Type the domain (example.com; an address at it works too) and select Add domain.
• Added for you — when an email hard-bounces because the recipient's mail gateway refused it (Barracuda, Proofpoint, Mimecast and the like say so in the bounce), rather than because the address is unknown, the domain is added here with the bounce's reason. That kind of bounce is the whole company's verdict on the sender, and the next person there would bounce the same way and count against the mailbox's bounce rule.

Every address at a listed domain is refused in Check people and again before each send, with the domain named. Take a domain off with its Remove button; both changes are written to your organization's activity. Domains of public mailbox providers are never added automatically.

The listed domains are a table, alphabetical, a page at a time. Its toolbar's Filters narrows them by Why they are listed (pick one or several), the whole Domain, or the day it was Added (on, before or after a date — the list is then newest added first). Search finds a domain by the start of any part of it — acme, acme.com or mail.acme all find mail.acme.com — or by a word of its detail, such as the gateway a bounce named. Every filter and the search are answered by the database across all your listed domains, not only the page on screen; a combination it cannot answer at once is named above the table instead of being applied to some rows. See Filter and search a list.

Import and export the do-not-contact list

Import and Export are in the Do not contact domains card's header.

Import takes a CSV, JSON or NDJSON file of email addresses, domains, or both, one per row, in a column the wizard maps to Entry. Each value decides what it adds: an email address (casey@example.com, or Casey <casey@example.com>) puts that one address on the list; anything else that reads as a domain (example.com, @example.com, https://www.example.com) puts the whole domain on it. An optional Note column says why, and is kept with the entry. Each new entry is recorded as added by you, exactly as if you had added it on this page.

An import only adds. A row whose entry is already on the list is skipped, whatever you choose in the wizard: the entry keeps the reason, the date and the note it was first added with, because that is the record of why it is there. Two spellings of one entry in the same file (Acme.com and www.acme.com) are imported once.

Before anything is written, the wizard's review step lists what each row will do, and asks you to acknowledge these:

• Neither an email address nor a domain — the value cannot be read as either, so the row is not imported. A value that looks like an address but is not a valid one (casey morgan@acme.com) is refused rather than read as its domain, so a typo never blocks a whole company.
• A public mailbox provider — the row adds a domain such as gmail.com or outlook.com. That blocks every person with an address there, not one person; add their address instead unless that is what you mean.
• Already covered — the row adds an address whose domain is on the list already, or is added by another row of the same file. The address is still added, so it stays blocked if the domain is ever taken off.

Importing needs the same access as this page — Use Sequences, across the whole organization, in a workspace whose plan includes Sequences — and every row is refused, with the reason, for anyone without it.

Export downloads the listed domains — all of them, or only the ones the table's search and filters show — with why each was listed, who added it and when. Addresses are never exported. The list keeps an address as a one-way fingerprint, never the address itself, so that it can go on refusing someone who asked not to be emailed without holding who they are; there is no address to read back out.

For seven days after an import, Undo on its results takes off the entries that import added, and only those. An entry that was taken off and added again since is asked about rather than removed, and one that Sequences added on its own since — a reply asking not to be emailed, an unsubscribe or a bounce — is always kept.

Sequences

A sequence is the emails, and the tasks between them, one person gets from one rep. Sequences → All sequences lists each one with its mailbox, its status, and how many people it has enrolled, and how many of them are still active, replied, bounced or opted out.

The list is newest first, a page at a time. The table's toolbar filters it. Filters narrows it by Status or Mailbox (pick one or several), by Name (a word in it, or the whole name), or by the day it was Created (on, before or after a date). Search finds a sequence by the start of any word of its name. Every filter and the search are answered by the database across all your sequences, not only the page on screen, and each filter in force shows as a chip above the table; remove a chip to drop its filter. The Filters panel edits one filter at a time, and filters on different columns add up. A combination the database cannot answer at once — a name word together with a search, for example — is named above the table rather than applied to some rows. See Filter and search a list.

Build a sequence

Select New sequence, name it, and choose the site whose CRM the people you enroll are contacts of and the mailbox it sends from. A sequence sends as the member who connected its mailbox, so only that member, or a member holding Manage everyone's Sequences, can edit or activate it.

The Mailbox list offers the mailboxes you connected, and a member holding that permission every mailbox in the organization. A disconnected mailbox is never offered. When exactly one of your own mailboxes is active, a new sequence starts on it. With none, connect one first.

Also send from adds more mailboxes the sequence sends from in rotation — several inboxes set up for outreach, for example, each sending its own daily cap. Each person you enroll is given one of them, or the sequence's own mailbox: whichever is active and has the fewest people waiting on it, across every sequence. Every email that person gets comes from that one mailbox, so follow-ups stay in the same conversation, and their replies and bounces are read there. A mailbox that is paused or needs reconnecting is passed over for new people; the ones already on it wait for it as usual. You can add or remove mailboxes here at any time, even after people are enrolled — it only changes who sends to the people you enroll next.

A sequence holds up to eight steps, of which up to four are emails:

• Email — a subject and a body, or a CRM email template whose body is sent. Insert merge fields — the contact's first name, company or job title, your own name, the site's name — and {{enrollment.personalLine}}, the sentence you write for each person when you enroll them. Every email after the first replies in the first one's thread unless you turn Reply in the same thread off, in which case it starts a new thread and needs its own subject.
• Task — a LinkedIn touch, a Call or a To-do for you, with a title.

Each step waits a number of business days after the one before it — up to 30, and at least 1 between emails — counted in the mailbox's timezone. The first step can wait 0 days: it goes at the next opening of the sending window. By default a sequence sends in its mailbox's sending hours; Sending hours sets hours of its own for this sequence.

Campaigns files the sequence under one or more of the site's campaigns, the way a form or a landing page is filed under one. Everyone you enroll from then on joins those campaigns on their own record — a lead at the top of its document, a contact on the site's facet — and what the sequence produces is counted on each campaign's page: people enrolled, first emails sent, replies, meetings booked from a sequence link, and enrolled leads that converted. A campaign the sequence joins later does not claim the people already in it, and one it leaves keeps what it was credited with. Filing a sequence under a campaign changes nothing about who is enrolled or what is sent.

Add a mail-client unsubscribe button is off unless you turn it on. On, every email the sequence sends carries the List-Unsubscribe header, so the recipient's mail app shows its own Unsubscribe button. That is the easiest way out for them, and people who have it mark fewer emails as spam, but Apple Mail, Gmail and Outlook then label the email as coming from a mailing list — a poor fit for one-to-one email. Off, the footer's "reply no" line is the way out, and it is on every email either way. See Unsubscribe.

Count opens is off unless you turn it on; see Count opens before you do.

The Preview beside the editor shows each email as it would reach a sample contact, with the real footer, and the editor lists anything that stops the sequence from being saved beside the field it is about.

Who it sends to, and when

The editor's Who it sends to, and when card sets the countries a sequence may reach, whether customers are included, and its own sending hours when its mailbox's should not apply.

Countries offers only those both the sequence and your organization allow. Sending hours of its own sets the days and the hours it sends.

The same card carries Count link clicks, Count opens and Add a mail-client unsubscribe button, each off until you turn it on, with what it costs written under the switch. With Include customers off, enrolling refuses a customer, and a person who becomes one later is stopped before their next email.

Count opens

A sequence email is plain text, the way an email you type to one person is, and a plain-text email can't tell anyone it was opened. So by default a sequence measures replies, bounces and — with Count link clicks on — clicks, and its Results card says plainly that opens aren't measured.

Count opens changes that for one sequence, for the emails it sends from then on. Each email goes out with two versions of the same message: the plain text, exactly as before, and an HTML copy of the same words — your line breaks, your links, the footer — with a 1×1 tracking image at the end. The image is served from the same short-link address as the sequence's tracked links, and loading it records an open for that person.

It has a cost, which is why it is off by default:

• It looks less like an email typed by hand. One-to-one mail has no HTML copy and no remote image. Most readers see no difference, but mail filters do.
• Some spam filters score it. An HTML part with a remote image is what marketing email looks like, and some corporate gateways count that against the sender. Use it to measure a slice of your sends — a new segment for a week, say — rather than leaving it on everywhere.

Not every image load is a person reading. Each load is judged by what it says it is and by whose network it came from:

• Gmail opens count. Gmail loads the image through its own proxy when the reader opens the email.
• Apple Mail Privacy Protection doesn't count. Apple loads every image through its privacy relay the moment the email arrives, whether or not anyone reads it.
• Mail scanners don't count. That covers loads from Google's mail network other than Gmail's proxy, loads from Microsoft's mail filter, and loads that borrow Apple's anonymous signature from anywhere but Apple's relay. Mail sent to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 addresses is often scanned this way, at delivery and again later.
• These don't count either: Yahoo's image proxy, security gateways that name themselves, and any load within 30 seconds of delivery.

Those loads are counted as Machine opens, shown beside the open figures and left out of the open rate. When every load so far was a machine's, the card shows the Open rate as Unmeasured rather than 0%: the scanners answered for everyone, and whether a person read the email behind them can't be told. A person's page lists each load with why it was or wasn't counted and which network it came from. The address itself is never kept. The Open rate is taken over the people who were sent at least one email carrying the image, not everyone the sequence emailed, so turning the switch on part-way through doesn't dilute it.

Turn it off and the next email goes out as plain text again; the figures already counted stay, and the card says they cover only the emails sent while it was on.

Send yourself a test of a step

Send a test on any email step of a saved sequence sends that step to your own inbox through the sequence's mailbox, so you read it as a recipient would — the merge fields filled, the footer on, the links as they will be sent, and a later step's "Re:" subject. The subject starts with [Test], so it never reads as real mail.

In the dialog, pick who fills the merge fields — the sample person the preview uses, or an open lead or contact of the sequence's site — and write the personal line the way you would when enrolling them. The test goes to your own address unless you type another, such as an outside mailbox you can read. The person whose record filled the tokens is not enrolled, and nothing is stored on them.

The test sends the step as it was last saved, so save your edits first. When the sequence counts link clicks, the links in the test are the tracking links a recipient gets, but your clicks on them are never counted. When it counts opens, the test carries the HTML copy and the tracking image too, and your opening it is never counted either. A test counts toward none of the sequence's numbers, the mailbox's daily cap or its sent counters, and files nothing on anyone's record; the Mailboxes card shows how many tests the mailbox sent today. It is a real send from your Google account, so it spends Google's own limits, and a mailbox that is paused or needs reconnecting refuses it and says why. A mailbox can send 20 tests an hour. Only the member who connected the mailbox, or a member holding Manage everyone's Sequences, can send one from it.

In the enroll dialog, Send me this as a test beside a person sends their first email — their record and the personal line you wrote — to you the same way, before you enroll them.

Activate, pause and archive

Status	What it means
Draft	Being written. Nothing is sent, and nobody can be enrolled.
Active	Enrolled people get each step when it comes due.
Paused	Nothing is sent. Activating it again picks up where each person was.
Archived	Final. Everyone still in it is stopped, and it takes no one new.

A sequence can be activated only while its mailbox is Active in Mailboxes. A paused mailbox has to be resumed, and one that says Reconnect required connected again, first. Activation also needs the legal name and postal address from Compliance settings. Until both are in place, the sequence's page says what is missing and Activate stays unavailable. If an active sequence's mailbox is paused or needs reconnecting, nothing is sent from it until the mailbox is active again.

A draft nobody was ever enrolled in can be deleted; once anyone has been enrolled, archive the sequence instead. After the first enrollment you can still reword a step and add steps at the end, but not remove, reorder or change the kind of a step, or move the sequence to another site or mailbox — people in it are partway through those steps. Start a new sequence to change them.

Enroll people

Select Enroll people on an active sequence, and choose them from a saved Contacts or Leads view, by searching your contacts at the sequence's site, or from the Leads tab — the site's open leads — up to 50 at a time. Enrolling reads your contacts and leads, so it takes the Manage data permission as well as Use Sequences.

A lead is enrolled as it is, with no contact made: the emails read the lead's name, company and title wherever the steps say {{contact.firstName}}, {{contact.company}} or {{contact.title}} (and {{lead.…}} reads the same fields), the sends and replies land on the lead's page, a call step files its task on the lead, and the lead's status follows the sequence: the first email actually sent to a New lead moves it to Nurturing — enrolling alone does not, nor does a step that never goes out — and a reply moves a New or Nurturing lead to Working. A lead already Working or closed keeps its status. When the lead converts, its enrollment carries on as the contact's — same thread, same place in the steps — so a person is never enrolled twice by being two records. A lead that already converted, one whose address is already a contact, and one closed as unqualified are blocked with the reason: enroll the contact, or reopen the lead.

Before anything is enrolled, each person is marked:

• Eligible — enrolled as they are.
• Needs you — enrolled once you've written their personal line and confirmed what's asked below.
• Blocked — not enrolled, with the reason: a personal mailbox, which a cold email never goes to; an address outside the allowed countries, or in no known country; on the platform's or your site's suppression list after a bounce, a complaint or an unsubscribe; opted out of sales email from the site; on your organization's do-not-contact list, or at a domain on it; a member of your workspace; a customer, unless the sequence includes customers; already in a sequence; or a lead that converted, is already a contact, or was closed as unqualified.

Beside each person, Preview the first email shows the email they would get with your personal line in it, and Send me this as a test sends that email to your own inbox first — see Send yourself a test of a step.

Start at a later step

When someone already had the first email — you wrote it by hand, before the sequence existed — pick the step they begin at in Start at, above the people. Everyone you enroll in that batch begins there:

• The steps before it are marked skipped on the enrollment and never sent. The person's record and the enrollment's history both say which ones.
• The step you picked waits its own delay, counted from the moment you enroll — a step set to 3 business days goes out 3 business days from now.
• The first email sent from there starts its own email thread, under your first email's subject when the step was written as a reply, since there is no earlier email of the sequence's for it to answer. The emails after it reply in that thread as usual.
• A reply, a bounce or an opt-out stops the enrollment from the moment you enroll, as it does after a send, and the unsubscribe link works the same.

Preview the first email and Send me this as a test show the first email sent from the step you picked. A curated copy of a skipped step is left out. Leave Start at on step 1 to start from the beginning, which is the default; a step past the sequence's last is refused.

Before you enroll: mail gateways

Some companies put a security gateway — Barracuda, Proofpoint, Mimecast — in front of their mail, and a gateway refuses a sender for everyone behind it: the bounce says blocked, not "no such user", and the next person at that company bounces the same way. The domain's public MX record names the gateway before anything is sent, so Check people looks it up for every address (once a week per domain, cached on your organization) and shows a chip beside each person:

• Barracuda · 2 of 2 sends refused this week (red) — that gateway has refused this organization's mail this week. The person is shown, not blocked, and starts un-ticked with the reason under them; ticking them is your call, and the email then goes.
• Proofpoint · 1 of 1 delivered this week (green) — the gateway let the sender through lately.
• Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or a security gateway with no verdict yet — nothing to act on.
• No MX record — cannot receive mail — the domain takes no mail at all, and the person is blocked with the reason.

The summary line above the people counts how many are behind a security gateway — 2 gateway-fronted — LinkedIn-first? — because a LinkedIn note is the cheaper first touch where email is likely to be refused.

What a gateway did with your mail is learned from outcomes, per organization: every send is counted against the gateway in front of it, a hard bounce that reads as the gateway refusing you counts as a block, and a send with no bounce a day later counts as delivered. A gateway that refused you twice in the last thirty days and delivered nothing holds the next email into it: the enrollment pauses as Held — gateway refused this sender twice, on the Enrollments tab, and Resume on that row sends it anyway. A person you ticked past the red chip is not held again — you already decided.

These are the same deliverability checks every email Aglyn sends goes through: an address whose domain takes no mail is never sent to, from a sequence or anywhere else.

Cold contacts

A contact is cold when nothing on your site shows they came to you: no form, sign-up, order or booking, and no email from them. A lead is judged the same way: one that wrote in through a form or booked is not cold; one you imported or added by hand is. For each cold contact you write a personal line — one sentence on why you're writing to this person now, which the sequence puts where {{enrollment.personalLine}} is — and confirm three things only you can know:

• This is a US business address.
• They or their company published this address, or they gave it to us — never guessed from a name, and never bought.
• This address was verified as deliverable.

Each confirmation is stored on the enrollment with who made it and when.

Enroll checks every person again as it enrolls them, so someone who unsubscribed a moment ago is refused even though they were eligible when you looked. A person goes through a sequence once: they can't be enrolled in the same sequence again, even after it finishes.

Enrolling someone in a sequence that is in a campaign files them under that campaign too: the enrollment records the campaigns as they stood, the lead or contact gains them on its own record, and the campaign's page counts the person under Enrolled from that moment. Their first email, a reply, a meeting booked from a link in a sequence email and a lead's conversion are each counted there once as they happen, and the person's page says the sequence is where they came from when nothing else is credited first.

Enrollments

A sequence's Enrollments tab lists everyone in it: their status, the step they're on, when the next one is due in the mailbox's timezone, when the last one went, and why they stopped when they have. A person enrolled as a lead is marked Lead until the lead converts. For each one you can:

• Pause and Resume — nothing is sent while they're paused. An enrollment the engine held because its mail gateway refused you twice is paused the same way, and Resume on it sends the email anyway.
• Stop — they get nothing more from this sequence.
• Mark do-not-contact — puts the address on your organization's do-not-contact list, which every sequence checks before every send, and stops them in every other sequence too.

The tab lists the people newest enrolled first, a page at a time, and its toolbar filters them. Filters narrows them by Status or Stop reason (pick one or several), by Enrolled as (contact or lead), by the whole Email address, or by the day they were Enrolled (on, before or after a date). Search finds a person by the start of any word of their name or of their address — casey, morgan or example.com all find casey.morgan@example.com. Every filter and the search are answered by the database across everyone in the sequence, not only the page on screen; a combination it cannot answer at once is named above the table instead of being applied to some rows. See Filter and search a list.

On a sequence that counts link clicks, the Clicks column shows how many times the person clicked and how many different links they followed — 2 · 1 link. Clicks made by security scanners aren't in it. Filters adds Clicked and Link followed, and the column chooser adds Links followed, Last click and Scanner clicks, which the export then includes. On a sequence that counts opens, the Opens column beside it shows the person's own opens, with any loads by mail proxies and scanners under them — 2, then 3 by machines — which aren't in the number. The column chooser adds Last open. Stop reason shows the short reason; hover it for the whole of it.

The sequence's Results card leads to the same list: select the Clicked figure to see the people who clicked, or a destination under Links followed to see the people who followed it.

See one person's history

Select a person's row on a sequence's Enrollments tab — or focus it and press Enter — to open their page, which shows where they are in the sequence and everything it has done to them. Its address is theirs alone, so you can paste it into a comment or a message to point a teammate at one person. The page has three parts:

• The header — their name and address, a Lead or Contact chip that opens their CRM record, their status, the step they're on and when the next one sends, with the same actions as the row's menu. A person who wrote back has Reply in thread as the header's button — see Answer a reply. A person held because their mail gateway refused you shows why, and Resume and send sends the email anyway. Under it, five numbers: emails sent, clicks, links followed, scanner clicks (which aren't counted) and replies — and, on a sequence that counts opens, their opens, with the machine opens that weren't counted beside them.
• Activity — everything that happened to them; see Their activity.
• Details — the record behind the enrollment; see Their enrollment's details.

Their activity

The Activity card lists everything the sequence did to one person, newest first, and Open thread in Gmail opens the conversation in the sending mailbox.

It holds when they were enrolled and by whom, each email with its subject as sent (and whether it was their curated copy), each link they followed with the full address and the email it came from, scanner visits with why they were read as a scanner, each open and each machine open with why it wasn't counted, each reply and automatic answer with what they wrote, each answer you sent with your words and who sent it, bounces with what the receiving server said, holds, pauses, resumes and stops with who did it and why.

Clicks are listed one at a time from the release that added this page. Clicks before it were kept only as a count, the times of the first and last, and the last link followed, so the page shows them as one line saying exactly that rather than guessing at the rest. Someone enrolled but not yet emailed shows Nothing yet and when their first step sends.

Their enrollment's details

The Details card is closed until you open it, and holds what the enrollment was made with: the personal line, the attestations, the mailbox, the campaigns, what your mail has met at their domain, each curated email in full, the Gmail threads and the enrollment's id.

Curate a send for one person

A step is one email for everyone, plus the personal line. Curate for this person, on each person in the enroll dialog's check, rewrites every email step for that one person: the workspace's AI drafts each one from their record — name, company, title, website, tags, how they came to you, the campaigns they're filed under — with the sequence's own steps as the skeleton and your personal line as the reason for writing now. Each draft appears under the person, editable. Read it, change what you like, tick I've read this draft, and it goes out to this person as written, and select Use this — or Keep the template to send the step as the sequence wrote it. Preview the first email then shows the curated version. Nothing is stored until you enroll them, and nothing you didn't confirm is ever sent: a draft you leave open holds the person back from Enroll.

Later, on an active enrollment, Enrollments › the row's menu › Curate next step rewrites the next email that hasn't gone out — after a reply, a click or a change on their site — and stores it the moment you use it. The row reads Curated while the step it's on has its own copy.

A curated email is still the sequence's email: the merge fields fill in, the footer goes on the end, links are tracked when the sequence tracks them, and the same rules apply before anything is kept — one link at most, list price only (no discount, coupon, cohort, slot count or deadline), plain text with no markup, no invented facts. A draft that breaks one is refused until it's fixed. The person's Activity gains a line — Curated step 2 — AI draft, edited by you — with the prompt and the model kept on the enrollment for the audit record, and each draft counts against the workspace's AI credits and allotments like any other generation. When the AI can't draft — the workspace has no AI, your role doesn't include generating with it, or an allotment is spent — you can still write the person's copy yourself.

How sends are scheduled

Every 15 minutes, the steps that have come due are sent, from each rep's own mailbox:

• In the sending hours of the sequence, or of its mailbox, read in the mailbox's timezone. A step that comes due outside them waits for the next opening.
• Within the day's limit — the daily cap and the warm-up — spread across the sending hours, so a day's emails do not all leave in its first half hour. One run sends at most five emails from a mailbox, follow-ups before first emails.
• After every check again. Everything enrolling checked is checked again before each email — the do-not-contact list, the suppression lists, the site's sales-email opt-outs, whether the person became a customer or joined your workspace — because a person enrolled on Monday can unsubscribe by Thursday.

Each email is sent once: two runs that overlap never send the same step twice, and never go over a mailbox's cap between them. It is filed on the contact's timeline in the CRM as an email from the rep, and a task step becomes a CRM task for the rep, due the day it comes due.

Nothing is sent while your organization's legal name or postal address is missing, or while a mailbox is paused or needs reconnecting — those sequences wait.

What stops a sequence

Each connected mailbox is read every 15 minutes for what came back:

What happens	What it does
The person replies	Stops the sequence (Replied), files the reply on the contact's timeline with a line saying the sequence stopped, gives the rep the task Reply from their name, and keeps what they wrote on the enrollment so you can answer it in the thread.
An out-of-office reply	Keeps the sequence going, moves the next step to at least five business days after the reply, and keeps the reply on the enrollment.
They ask not to be emailed — a reply such as "no" or "unsubscribe", or, when the sequence adds the mail-client unsubscribe button, that button's link or a message to the unsubscribe address	Stops the sequence (Opted out), puts the address on your do-not-contact list, unsubscribes it from the site's Sales outreach email, and stops it in every other sequence.
The email hard-bounces	Stops the sequence (Bounced) and puts the address on your do-not-contact list and on the platform's suppression list. When the bounce says the recipient's mail gateway refused it rather than that the address is unknown, the whole domain goes on the list too, and the enrollment says so.
A check refuses them before the next email — a customer now, a member of your workspace, on a suppression list	Stops the sequence, saying which check.
Their mail gateway refused you twice this month and delivered nothing	Holds the next email (Held — gateway refused this sender twice) until a member selects Resume on the row — see mail gateways.
The mailbox is disconnected or removed, or the member who connected it leaves the organization	Stops the sequences that send from it.
The next email needs something the contact doesn't have — a first name for {{contact.firstName}}	Pauses the enrollment, naming what is missing. Fill it in and select Resume.

A reply that arrives after the sequence finished, or after it was stopped, is still read: the enrollment moves to Replied, or to Opted out when the reply asks not to be emailed.

Every verdict a list takes is written on the person's record too: the lead or the contact carries an email state — Bounced, Blocked by their mail gateway, Unsubscribed, Marked as spam, Do not contact — and the email the sequence sent reads Bounced on their timeline. A member marking an enrollment do-not-contact stamps the record the same way.

The sequence's own turns are on the record's Activity as well, signed Sequences: Enrolled in the sequence when a person is enrolled, with the campaigns the enrollment filed them under, and stopped: they replied or stopped: they opted out under the last email it sent. A bounce adds no line of its own — the sent email already reads Bounced.

Answer a reply

When someone writes back — a reply, or an automatic answer such as an out-of-office — answer them from Aglyn, in the same email thread, from the mailbox that wrote to them.

1. Open the person: select their row on the sequence's Enrollments tab, or open their lead or contact in the CRM.
2. Select Reply in thread. On their enrollment it is the header's button, and it is in the row's menu on the Enrollments tab. On their lead's or contact's page it reads Reply in thread from the mailbox's address and sits before Send email.
3. Read what they wrote. The dialog shows the address your answer goes from, who it goes to and its subject — Re: their subject — above the conversation so far: their messages, any earlier answers, and the sequence's emails by subject.
4. Write your answer in Your answer, then select Send answer.

Your answer:

• Goes from the enrollment's own mailbox, in the same thread — in your Gmail or Outlook and in theirs — as plain text, with their message quoted beneath it. Send email on a CRM record writes a new message from your site's sending address instead, which is why a person in a sequence thread is offered Reply in thread first.
• Is kept with the person. Their page's Activity lists it as Answered in the thread, with your words and who sent it, and their CRM record's timeline lists it as an email from the mailbox.
• Carries tracked links, on a sequence that counts link clicks. The links you write become the same short links the sequence's emails carry, on your link domain when you've set one up. A click on one shows on the person's Activity as From an answer in the thread. The message you're answering, quoted beneath yours, is left as they wrote it. On a sequence that doesn't count clicks, your links go out as you wrote them.
• Leaves the sequence where it is. A replied enrollment stays Replied. One still running after an out-of-office keeps its next step, and that step answers in the same thread.
• Isn't one of the sequence's emails. It doesn't count against the mailbox's daily cap, doesn't count toward the bounce rate that pauses a mailbox, and isn't in the sequence's results — nor are clicks on its links, which count for the person alone. The mailbox's card counts them on their own, as Answers to replies today.

The rules for cold emails — the allowed countries and the company-address check — don't apply here: the person wrote to you first. These still stop an answer, and the dialog says which before you write anything:

• The address or its domain is on your do-not-contact list. Take it off the list on the Compliance page to answer them.
• They asked not to be emailed, or their address bounced. Reply in thread isn't offered for them at all.
• The mailbox is paused or needs reconnecting. Resume it, or connect it again, on the Mailboxes page.
• The mailbox isn't yours. Only the member who connected it, or an owner or admin of the organization, can answer from it.

A reply that arrived before Sequences kept what people wrote back is read from the mailbox the first time the mailbox's member — or a member holding Manage everyone's Sequences — opens the person's page or Reply in thread, and is kept from then on.

Unsubscribe

Every email a sequence sends ends with the footer's "reply no", and a reply asking not to be emailed stops the person everywhere. An email with no footer, or with no legal name or postal address to put in it, is never sent.

A sequence with Add a mail-client unsubscribe button turned on also carries two more ways out, in the email's List-Unsubscribe header:

• a one-click unsubscribe link, which Gmail, Yahoo and most mail apps show as an Unsubscribe button;
• an unsubscribe address — the rep's own address with +unsubscribe added — for mail apps that unsubscribe by email.

The setting is off by default, because the header is what makes mail apps present an email as coming from a mailing list. Gmail and Yahoo require it of bulk senders — 5,000 or more emails a day — which a mailbox sending a sequence is not. With it on, an email whose link cannot be made waits rather than going out without it. Email campaigns carry the same setting, on by default there because a campaign is bulk mail.

Either one stops the person's sequences, puts the address on your do-not-contact list and unsubscribes it from the site's Sales outreach email. The link needs no sign-in, shows a plain page saying it is done, and keeps working for good — including after the setting is turned off, and after Sequences is paused for your workspace.

When a person is erased from your workspace, their enrollments are deleted with them. Their do-not-contact entry stays — it holds no address, only a one-way key — so they are never emailed again.

Related

• CRM
• Deliverability checks
• Email campaigns
• Custom roles