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The pipeline

Drafting & the review gate

How each ask is written, and why nothing leaves without your approval.

Each email is written for one person, about one role, from evidence — and then waits for you. Drafting is triggered by you, never by a background job, and no code path sends an unapproved email.

Who gets an email#

A batch picks targets in order: the ★ list first, then complete companies by selection odds. One ask per company per batch, to its best ready referrer, chosen in this order:

  1. A real address before a guessed one
    Anyone whose address is pattern-guessed goes to the back of the line, whatever their role.
  2. The tech team first
    The referral rank, which since 23 Oct 2026 puts engineers ahead of everyone: senior, staff, lead and founding engineers, then software engineers, then founders and CTOs, then engineering managers, technical recruiters and HR (see People & referrers).
  3. Then the surest
    A verified address, confirmed current employment, a known name.

A company gets at most two open asks at once, and nobody is asked twice inside 30 days. And since 23 Oct 2026 a guessed company address is the last resort: when someone ready to refer at a company already has a real address, no address is guessed for anyone there (see Email addresses).

How it is written#

  1. Gather
    The person, their role, the company, the role and its needs brief, your relevant work and repositories.
  2. Fill the contract
    A fixed set of slots — who you are, real work that matches their need, a polite referral ask, a humility line, your resume. A slot that can’t be filled from evidence means no email (stored as incomplete), not a vaguer one.
  3. Compose
    Your own direct template, rotated across wordings and subjects so no two recipients get identical text; 80–170 words; plain text.
  4. Score and flag
    A quality score (0–100) and review flags. Flags never rewrite — they point.

Review flags#

faithfulness
A claim not supported by the evidence
uncovered_claim
Claims a need the needs brief marks uncovered
ai_tell
Words that read as machine-written
length · one_ask · subject
Outside the word range, more than one ask, a weak subject
guessed
The address is pattern-guessed — know the risk before approving
deliverability
What a spam filter would see: an attachment, more than two links, a link shortener, link words naming a different site, a greeting without their name, broken characters, the same subject already sent into that company, three or more asks already going there — or a near-copy (80%+ the same) of mail already approved or sent into the same company’s domain
near_duplicate
80% or more the same, phrase for phrase, as mail already approved or sent to other companies. Gmail sees everything you send, so vary the wording
affiliation
The person’s current employment is not confirmed
Why the deliverability flags exist
On 23 Oct 2026 Gmail refused 9 of 24 asks into one company's domain as spam (5.7.1 Message blocked) after about fifteen near-identical emails went there within hours. A company's mail server sees every inbox at once and files a group of look-alikes as bulk. The flags point at that before you approve; the sender also holds mail after a block.

The review gate#

The Queue shows each draft with its flags and evidence above an editor. You can edit freely — what you save is exactly what goes out — then approve or reject. Approval refuses an empty subject or body, an expired draft (7 days), or a person who is suppressed, cooling down or no longer ready.

The only human step
Approval is the one moment your judgement is needed, and the whole system exists to make it take seconds. Pattern approval (approving a kind of email once) exists but is switched off: every email gets its own click.

Commands: outreach batch builds the week's drafts, outreach proposal shows how it would write without drafting, and the Email proposal page shows the evidence, structure and exact text before anything is drafted.