# Cold Email Autopilot The cold email autopilot emails the leads you found for you. You connect one or more of your own mailboxes, pick an AI agent and a strategy, choose the leads, and launch. The AI writes a personal first email for every lead, follows up in the same email thread on the days your strategy sets, stops the moment a lead replies, and answers replies in your agent's voice. Replies land in one inbox, sorted by what the lead said. It is built for a steady trickle of good emails, not for bulk: at most 20 emails a day per mailbox, after a warm-up. **Who has it.** Every account with [Find Leads](find-leads.md). It sits in the sidebar as **Autopilot**. ## The Autopilot page **Autopilot** in the sidebar opens one page with four tabs: | Tab | What is there | | --- | --- | | **Agents** | The AI agents that write your emails, with their sent emails, replies, reply rate, campaigns and mailboxes. | | **Campaigns** | Every campaign, and the button to start a new one. | | **Strategies** | The email sequences: how many emails, how many days apart, and what each one should say. | | **Senders** | The mailboxes the emails go out from, with their health and setup checks. | Lead replies are in **Inbox**, its own item in the sidebar (see [The inbox and reply sorting](#the-inbox-and-reply-sorting)). ## 1. Connect your mailboxes (Senders) The emails go out from your own mailboxes, so replies come straight back to you. Connect a mailbox with its app password, or with its IMAP and SMTP details for any other mail host. The inbox the platform runs for you can't send cold email; connect your own. Use an address on a domain you own, ideally a separate domain just for outreach, so your main domain's reputation is never at stake. Each mailbox card on **Senders** shows: - **Health**: **Healthy**, **Warming up**, **Paused by you**, or **Paused** with the reason (for example **Paused: too many bounces**). - **Warm-up**: the warm-up day and today's limit. - **Sent today** against today's limit. - **Bounce rate** over the last 7 days, with a ring for the last 50 sends. - **Mailbox setup**: the DNS check below. - **Company name and postal address**: shown at the bottom of every cold email. Cold email rules in most countries require it. ### Your company name and postal address Every cold email ends with a line holding your company name and postal address. A mailbox without one does not send and can't be added to a campaign. When a mailbox is missing it, the Senders card and the campaign launch step ask you for it right there; fill it in once per mailbox. ### Mailbox setup check Every mailbox has a **Mailbox setup** section. It checks the domain of the address when you add the mailbox, once a day after that, and whenever you click **Check DNS again**. It detects your mail provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho Mail, or another host) and marks each line as **Looks good**, **Worth a look** or **Needs fixing**: | Check | What it looks at | | --- | --- | | **SPF** | The record exists and includes your provider's servers. Two SPF records, or one that lets any server send, are flagged. | | **DKIM** | A signing key is published under your provider's usual name (google for Google Workspace, selector1 and selector2 for Microsoft 365). When your host uses its own name we say we could not find it, which is not always a problem. | | **DMARC** | The record exists, and its policy (none, quarantine or reject). | | **Receiving mail (MX)** | Replies to the address can arrive. | | **Mailbox type** | A free personal address (gmail.com, outlook.com and similar) gets a warning: cold email from it lands in spam fast. | Click **How to fix** on any line for the steps for your provider, the record to add (click the host or value to copy it), and a link to your provider's own setup guide. For a missing DMARC record you get a starter record that only monitors (p=none) and sends reports to the mailbox itself. Only one result stops a mailbox from sending: SPF and DKIM both missing, because most of its emails would land in spam. The card then says the mailbox is on hold. Fix one of the two and click **Check DNS again**, or click **Send anyway** to let it send regardless (**Hold again** undoes that). Every other finding is a warning and the mailbox keeps sending. A mailbox that was never checked yet waits for its first check. ### Warm-up and daily limits - **20 emails a day per mailbox at most.** You can set a lower number under **Emails a day**, never a higher one. First emails and follow-ups both count; AI answers to replies do not. - **Warm-up.** A new mailbox sends 5 emails on its first day and one more each day after, so it reaches 20 on day 16. Mail providers learn to trust it that way. - **Spacing.** Emails from one mailbox go out 4 to 11 minutes apart, at random. - **Sending window.** Weekdays from 09:00 to 17:00 by default; change it under **Sending days** and **Sending hours**. The window is read in the lead's own time zone when we know it (from a time zone on the lead, their country, or their phone number's country code). For countries with several time zones, the mailbox's own time zone is used. A day the mailbox could not send is never made up the next day. - **Two first emails a day per company domain.** At most two leads at the same company domain get a first email on the same day. ### When a mailbox pauses on its own - **Bounces.** A mailbox pauses when 3 emails in a row bounce, or when more than 3% of its last 50 emails bounced once it has sent at least 40. The card says so in plain words. Check the lead list, then resume it. - **A broken login.** When the mailbox's password stops working, nothing sends from it until you reconnect it. ## 2. Create an agent (Agents) The agent is who writes the emails: its company info and its instructions for emails decide what your offer is and how the emails sound. On **Agents**, create one with the guided setup: 1. **Your website**: type your address and click **Find pages** (or press Enter). You see your site's pages with the most useful ones already ticked. Keep, add or untick pages: the agent learns from the pages you keep, and the same pages go into its knowledge so it can answer replies. **Build my agent** stays greyed out until at least one page is ticked. The picker shows what reading the pages costs in credits. If the site's pages cannot be listed, only the homepage is ticked and a note says so; you can add more pages to the agent's knowledge later. If something important is not on your site, open **Anything the website does not say? (optional)** and add a sentence or two. 2. **Build my agent**. 3. **Review**: the **Agent name** (taken from your website) and the **Email language** (your account's language) can be changed here, along with what it wrote under **Your offer**, **Who is writing** and **What the emails say**. Then **Save agent**: the agent's editor opens on its **Test** tab, so you can try it before a campaign uses it. **Open full editor** goes to the editor without saving the review. The editor is the full agent editor: **Overview**, **AI Instructions**, **Active Hours**, **Media**, **FAQs & Knowledge**, **AI Abilities**, **Tags**, **Follow-ups** and **Test**. Changes to how it writes are saved as a draft until you **Publish**, and every published version is kept. A new agent starts paused. Check that its company info states your real prices and terms before a campaign uses it: the first email states your offer with its terms. To see what it would actually write, use its **Test** tab (see [Test your agent](#test-your-agent)). ## 3. Pick or build a strategy (Strategies) A strategy is the sequence: the first email, the follow-ups, how many days each one waits, and what each should say. Three come ready to use: **Straight offer**, **Question first** and **Short and dry**. You can duplicate and edit any of them, or write your own. - **Generate with AI.** Pick the **Agent**, optionally a **Campaign** and a **Goal**, and how many **Follow-ups**. A draft strategy opens in the editor, unsaved, for you to check and save. Drafting one uses AI credits. - **Instructions or your own text.** Each email has an instruction for the AI (what to say). Each email can also hold your own text, word for word, which is what goes out when a campaign has **AI personalization** off (see [AI personalization off](#ai-personalization-off-your-own-emails)). - **Links.** The first email never has a link. A follow-up may carry one link when that step allows it. ### Results per strategy Every strategy shows how it did over every campaign that used it: **Leads started**, **Emails sent**, **Replies**, **Interested**, **Unsubscribed** and **Bounces**. Under 30 leads it says **Too early to call**. Tick 2 to 4 strategies and **Compare** shows them side by side. ### Sharing a strategy **Create a share link** gives a public page anyone can open without signing in: every email's day, wait, instructions and text. Your links, email, phone, company and agent names show as fill-ins, and your results, leads and agent are never shown. **New link** replaces the link, **Stop sharing** turns it off. Someone who opens a shared strategy while signed in can click **Copy to my strategies** and fill in their own details. Signed out, the page offers to log in or create an account. **Install from link** on the Strategies tab does the same from a link you were sent. ## 4. Launch a campaign (Campaigns) **New campaign** walks you through four steps. **Leads.** Pick **A saved search**, **The leads I selected**, or **A CSV file**. Before anything is created you see how many leads will be emailed and why the others are skipped: - Only leads with a verified email are emailed. **Include catch-all addresses** adds addresses whose mail server accepts anything (off by default). - Shared mailboxes like info@ and sales@ are skipped unless you tick **Include shared mailboxes like info@ and sales@**. - German and Austrian addresses (.de, .at) are skipped, because cold business email there needs consent first. **Include German and Austrian addresses (.de, .at)** adds them. - UK leads on a personal mailbox (Gmail, Outlook and so on) get a warning: UK rules treat those as individuals, so make sure your email is relevant to them as a business. - Leads on do not disturb, or whose address bounced before, are always skipped. - Leads you already emailed are skipped unless you tick **Email leads I already contacted before**. **Mailboxes.** Tick one to three of your mailboxes. A mailbox without a company name and postal address asks for it here. **Strategy and agent.** Pick the strategy and the agent that writes the emails, and decide on **AI personalization**. The step shows what the campaign will cost (see [Credits](#credits)). Here you can also tick **Test a second strategy (A/B)**. **Preview and launch.** See real first emails for leads on this list, regenerate them if you like, and keep **Check the first 10 emails before they go out** on (the default). Then **Launch campaign**. ### Emailing leads straight from Find Leads In **Find Leads** and **Saved Leads**, tick the leads you want (**Select leads with a verified email** helps) and press **Email with Autopilot** in the bar at the bottom. It starts a new campaign with those leads already picked. ### CSV files The CSV needs an email column. Column names are matched loosely (capitals, spaces, dashes and dots don't matter): | Column | Names it understands | | --- | --- | | Email (required) | email, email address, mail | | Name | name, full name, contact name, first name | | Company | company, company name, business, business name, organisation, organization | | Website | website, url, site, domain | | Location | location, address, city, country | | Verification | verification, verification status, email status, status, verified | Every other column is kept as a fact about the lead, which the AI may use and which your own email text can fill in. A file can hold up to 1,000 leads and 2 MB. Only rows marked as verified in the verification column (verified, valid, ok, deliverable or good) are emailed. A file without a verification column sends to nobody, so check your addresses with a verifier first and include its result. ### Checking the first emails (Review) With **Check the first 10 emails before they go out** on, the first 10 emails of the campaign wait on the campaign's **Review** tab. You can set any number from 0 to 50 in the strategy. For each one: **Approve** it, edit it and **Save and approve**, or **Reject** it. An email also waits on Review when it **Did not pass the checks** (for example too long, a link in a first email, or too close to an email sent before) after one rewrite, or when it **Mentions something unverified** that is not in your agent's info or the lead's facts. ### What the lead receives - **The first email**: plain text, 50 to 120 words, a short subject of 2 to 6 words, no links, your offer with its terms and one yes or no question. - **Follow-ups**: replies in the same thread (Re: and the first email's subject), at most 160 words, on the days the strategy sets. - **Your footer**: your company name and postal address on every email. - **Unsubscribe**: every email carries a one-click unsubscribe that mail apps such as Gmail show next to the sender. - Plain text only, so no tracking pixel. ### The campaign page The campaign page shows how it is doing (emails sent, replies, interested, bounces, unsubscribes), the **Review** tab, and **Pause** / **Resume**. An A/B campaign shows both strategies side by side; once one is ahead, **Keep A** or **Keep B** moves the other side's leads that have not started yet to the winner. Leads already in a sequence keep going, and this can't be undone. Under 30 leads per side it says it is too early to call. ## Test your agent Before a campaign goes out, you can play the lead and see exactly what your agent would write. Open the agent from **Autopilot > Agents** and go to its **Test** tab, or click **Test** on the agent's card. The panel is called **Test this agent**. 1. **Pick a lead.** Choose **One of my leads** and search your saved leads, or **Make one up** with a name, company, website and city (at least a name, a company or a website). 2. **Emails from.** Pick a strategy, or a campaign. A campaign also brings its mailbox and its booking link to the replies. 3. **Read their website first** (optional). The agent reads the lead's homepage and about page and writes the same [Research brief](#research-brief) a real campaign writes before the first email. It needs a website for the lead, and it is not offered for a campaign with AI personalization off, because that campaign sends the emails you wrote. 4. Click **Show what my agent would send**. You see the research brief, the first email with its subject, and each follow-up of the strategy with the day it would go out. An email marked **Would wait for your review** is one the autopilot would hold on the campaign's Review tab, with the reason (see [Checking the first emails](#checking-the-first-emails-review)). With AI personalization off you see **Your written email**: your own text with the lead's details filled in. Then **Reply as the lead**: pick which email they answer under **They reply to**, write what the lead might say and click **Send**. You get your agent's reply in email form, and under **Sorted as** the label the reply would get in your inbox: **Interested**, **Not now**, **Not interested**, **Unsubscribe**, **Out of office** or **Other**. Just like in a real campaign, a reply stops the sequence, so the follow-ups after the email they answered are marked **Would not go out**. **Start over** clears the test so you can try another lead or other emails. Good to know about testing: - **Nothing is sent.** No email goes out, and no lead or contact is created. - **The first 60 test runs each day are free.** Each part the agent writes (the research, an email, a reply) is one test run, and the panel shows how many free runs you have left today. After that the test keeps working and each AI step uses 0.25 credits, the same as on a real campaign. Emails you wrote yourself (AI personalization off) are always free and do not count. If you run out of credits, add credits and test again. - **It uses your published agent.** Changes you have not published yet are not part of the test, so save and publish your edits first, then test them here. - **Replies are written the real way.** The agent answers with the same instructions as it does for a real lead. Actions such as booking a meeting are not carried out in a test. ## Research brief With AI personalization on, before a lead's first email the autopilot reads their homepage plus one about or services page and writes a short **Research brief**: what they do, who they serve, a few exact quotes from their site, and one or two ideas for the opening line tied to a quote. The emails may quote those lines word for word; nothing else from the site is claimed. If the site does not load, the brief says **Facts only: their website did not load** and the emails use only what the lead list says. You see the brief on the review card and in the lead panel in the inbox. ## AI personalization off: your own emails **AI personalization** is a campaign option, on by default. Switch it off and every lead gets the emails you wrote in the strategy, with their details filled in: - Use `{first_name}`, `{company}`, `{city}` or any other lead fact (a CSV column, for example) in your text. - A missing detail reads as a neutral word: there, your business, your area. - Nothing is researched or written by the AI, so these emails cost no credits. - Everything else stays the same: sending hours and limits, checking the first emails, the footer, unsubscribe and threading. - An AI answer to a lead's reply still follows the strategy's reply setting. ## The inbox and reply sorting Replies arrive in **Inbox** as email threads. Every lead reply on an autopilot thread is sorted into **Interested**, **Not now**, **Not interested**, **Unsubscribe**, **Out of office** or **Other**. The inbox opens on **Interested**, shows the label on each row and in the thread, and you change it with **Sort reply** in the thread header. Campaign stats count leads per label. The label itself changes nothing: the sequence already stopped when the lead replied, and the AI answers as before. The lead panel shows the campaign, the step, the next send, the research brief and any deal, with **Pause**, **Stop** and **Do not contact** for that one lead. You can write a reply yourself from the composer, choosing the mailbox it goes from; it threads under the first email. ## What happens when a lead answers - **Any reply stops the sequence** for that lead. No more follow-ups go out. - **An out of office** reply is not answered; the next email waits until the day after the date they say they are back. - **A reply that is only STOP** (or UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, QUIT, END) puts the lead on do not disturb. So does the one-click unsubscribe. They are never emailed again. - **A bounce** marks the address as undeliverable, puts the lead on do not disturb and drops their queued emails. - **Everything else** gets an answer from your agent, in email form, unless you take the thread over. ## When a lead is interested: deal and booking link The campaign page has a **When a lead is interested** card. - **Create a deal when a lead is interested** is on by default. The moment a reply is sorted **Interested**, by the AI or by you, the lead gets one deal in the first stage of your default pipeline, or the **Deal stage** you pick. The deal is named after the lead and their company, and its description holds the campaign name and a link to the thread. A lead never gets a second deal, none is made when they already have an open deal, and changing the label away from Interested keeps the deal. - **Booking link**: **None** (the default), your own booking page (suggested first when you have one), or **Other link**. The AI only offers it after the lead has replied, when they are interested and ask to talk, meet or for times. It never goes into a first email or a follow-up, and never to a lead who said not interested or unsubscribed. - **Interested leads** on the campaign page lists them with their company and deal stage, and opens the thread. To do more when a lead is interested, for example tell your team on WhatsApp, use the **Lead reply sorted** trigger in [Automations](../automations/automations.md). ## The morning digest On a morning after the autopilot was busy you get one email, around 08:00 in your time zone: how many emails went out, who replied (up to 10 leads, each with a short preview and a link to the conversation), which replies look interested, and any mailbox that needs a look. Nothing is sent after a quiet day. Switch it off in **Settings > Notifications > Autopilot morning digest** (see [Notifications](../settings/notifications.md)). ## Credits Each step costs 0.25 credits: | Step | Credits | | --- | --- | | Finding the lead | 0.25, once, when you saved it in Find Leads | | Research brief | 0.25, once per lead, nothing when their website did not load | | First email | 0.25 | | Each AI follow-up | 0.25 | | Each AI answer to a reply | 0.25 | | Sorting a reply | included | | Testing your agent | first 60 test runs a day free, then 0.25 per AI step | So a lead's first email costs about 0.75 credits including the lead itself, and a reply stops the follow-ups, so most leads cost less than the full sequence. The campaign wizard shows the most a campaign can cost if nobody replies. There is no separate automation charge on autopilot campaigns. With **AI personalization** off your own emails cost nothing; only an AI answer to a reply uses credits. With your own AI key (BYOK), the autopilot's AI runs on your key. ## Good to know - **Cold email laws still apply to you.** The footer, the unsubscribe and the .de/.at default help, but you decide who you email and what you say. - **Connecting by Google or Microsoft sign-in is not available yet.** Use an app password or the IMAP and SMTP details. - **Use a separate outreach domain** with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up, and never your main inbox.