Overview
The Inbox is where every outreach conversation for a site lives — the threads the Outreach Agent started, the replies recipients sent back, the pitches you forwarded in from your normal inbox, and the direct mail prospects sent to your bucket address. Open it from the Library (the Inbox card shows a count of threads waiting on you), or go to/inbox directly.
The Inbox is also the only place you configure the Outreach Agent. The agent is not an Automation — there is exactly one per site, and you turn it on, set up its email, and shape how it writes from the Settings button in the Inbox header. See Configuring the Outreach Agent below.
The view is three panes:
- Left — the conversation list, with filters and search, plus the Settings button.
- Center — the active thread, with every inbound and outbound message, engagement counts, and a composer.
- Right — actions for the active thread (pause AI, mark resolved, hand off to the agent, block the contact) and context (the originating opportunity, the agent’s reasoning).
Configuring the Outreach Agent
Click Settings in the top-left of the Inbox to open the Outreach Agent settings. Everything the agent needs lives in one modal, organized into tabs:- Domain — your sending domain pool. Add one or more outbound domains, complete DNS verification, and Assign the one the agent sends from. See Sending domains below and the full Outreach Email Setup walkthrough.
- Inbox — reply tracking: the Reply-To mailbox + forwarding relay so replies route back to the agent, the Forward emails to your agent address, and the Send from selector (which assigned domain the agent uses).
- Agent — the on/off switch plus a small set of controls: a context / guidance box (plain-English instructions the agent follows on every email), the voice, the sender name (used in the From line and signature), how many emails per run, and an optional monthly email cap. The agent must be on to send, the switch stays disabled until a sending domain is verified, and it runs on a fixed schedule — Monday–Friday at 9:00 AM ET — so there are no cron settings to manage.
- Outreach — toggles for proactive cold outreach (e.g. listicle placement pitches).
- Suppressions — your team-wide do-not-contact list: auto-unsubscribe behavior, manual blocking, and bulk import (see Suppressions).
Which domain to add. If you’ll run cold outreach (the Outreach tab), the sending domain must be a dedicated domain, not your main brand domain — cold sending can poison your primary domain’s deliverability, the same reason lemlist and Instantly insist on it. If you’re only using the agent to reply to people who emailed you first (forwarded pitches and inbound replies, with the Outreach tab off), your main domain is fine — those replies are warm, expected mail. The agent sends everything from one assigned domain, so if cold outreach is in play, make it the dedicated one. See Outreach Email Setup.
What’s in the list
Every row shows the recipient, the latest subject, a one-line preview of the most recent message, and a status pill.Filters
The left rail groups filters into Inbox, In progress, and Closed, and every filter shows a live count that updates in real time as mail arrives and threads change state.Unread state
A blue dot and bold recipient name flag threads with unread inbound messages. Opening a thread marks it read for the whole team. The Inbox card in the Library tracks the number of threads with at least one unread message — if it’s at zero, you’re caught up.Entry source badges
Below the subject line you’ll see one of:Search
The search box matches against the recipient email, the recipient’s name, and the latest subject. Searches run server-side after a quarter-second pause, so it’s safe to type fast.What’s in the active thread
The center pane is a top-to-bottom log of every message in the conversation:- Outbound bubbles sent by the agent are tagged AI; manual replies you wrote are tagged You.
- Inbound bubbles are tagged Them.
- Each bubble shows delivery, opens, and clicks (the agent tracks these via Mailgun’s engagement webhook).
- Failed sends show a Failed badge with the failure reason on hover; outbound failures get an inline Retry button that re-sends the same content under a fresh dedup key — see Retrying a failed send below.
Replying
You can reply at any time, and the agent stays paused on that thread until you turn it back on so you don’t accidentally race the agent.Manual reply
Click into the composer at the bottom of the thread and type. Cmd/Ctrl + Enter sends. The reply goes out from your verified outbound domain — the recipient sees the same identity as an agent reply. Attach images. Click the paperclip to attach an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP, up to 5 MB) as a real email attachment, or paste an image to embed it inline in the body. Thumbnails appear in the composer and on the sent message.Draft with AI
Click Draft with AI to fill the composer with a fresh draft based on the conversation history, your configured voice, and your outreach guidance. Edit the draft and click Send reply when you’re ready. The draft uses your team’s monthly LLM budget the same way the agent’s drafts do.Have the agent take this over
For threads in Needs you status (forwarded non-pitches, direct inbound from external senders), the right pane shows a violet Have the agent take this over button. Click it and the agent flips into action: it triages the latest inbound, drafts a reply, and (subject to your delay and monthly limits) sends it. The agent picks up on whatever message is most recent, so a late inbound during the agent’s setup window won’t get missed. This requires a verified sending domain, which you add from the Inbox Settings button (see Configuring the Outreach Agent). Without one the agent has nowhere to reply from, and the button refuses with a clear message.Right-pane controls
AI auto-replies (per thread)
The card at the top shows whether the agent is on or paused for this thread. Toggle it any time. Pausing here doesn’t affect the agent on other threads — it’s a per-conversation override that’s useful when you want to handle a thread personally without disabling the agent everywhere.Status
- Mark resolved — the conversation is done; the agent stops working on it.
- Mark declined — the conversation is done and the contact is added to your team-wide suppression list automatically. The agent will not pitch this contact from any site on your team going forward.
- Reopen conversation — undoes a resolved or declined state and turns the agent back on (subject to your auto-reply settings).
Tag the result (wins)
When outreach lands a win, tag it in the Result card so it shows up in your Results view. Choose one:- Backlink acquired
- Guest post published
- Brand mention
Move to trash
The trash icon in the thread header removes a conversation from your Inbox, counts, and Results. The history is kept (not permanently deleted) so the agent won’t accidentally re-contact that recipient later. Trashed threads are hidden everywhere and can’t be replied to or tagged.Block this contact
Adds the recipient’s email to your team-wide suppression list without resolving the conversation. Useful when someone asks you to stop emailing them — the agent will refuse to send to that address going forward, on any site on the team.Agent reasoning
For threads where the agent has replied, this card shows what the agent thought it was doing — the triage category (acceptance, decline, negotiation), whether the agent decided to auto-resolve, and any skip reasons that came up along the way. Useful when you want to understand “why did the agent reply that way” without reading raw logs.Opportunity
For agent-initiated threads, the right pane shows the article the agent pitched: the URL, the domain, the domain rating, and a link to open the article in a new tab.Results
The Results view (the trophy icon at the bottom of the Inbox rail, or/inbox/results) is the highlight reel of everything your outreach has landed. It lists every conversation you’ve tagged with a result, newest first, with summary counts for:
- Backlink acquired
- Guest post published
- Brand mention
Sending domains
The agent sends from a pool of outbound domains you manage under Settings → Domain. You can add more than one domain, but the agent sends every email — cold pitches and replies alike — from the single assigned domain (set under Settings → Inbox → Send from).- Add a domain, then complete DNS verification (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
- Verify it — a freshly verified domain can be auto-assigned to the agent.
- Assign the domain you want the agent to send from; the others stay in the pool as backups.
Suppressions
Your suppression list is the team-wide do-not-contact list — the agent refuses to email any address on it, from any site on your team. Manage it under Settings → Suppressions:- Auto-unsubscribe — recipients who ask to stop are suppressed automatically; marking a thread declined also adds the contact.
- Block a contact — add a single address by hand.
- Import a list — paste addresses (one per line or CSV) or upload a
.csv/.txtfile to suppress in bulk (up to 5,000 addresses at a time). Imported entries are reasoned as manually blocked and never downgrade a stronger reason like a hard bounce or spam complaint. - Allow again — lift a suppression from the live list.
Retrying a failed send
Outbound messages can fail when Mailgun rejects the recipient address, when your sending domain is unverified, when an upstream blip happens, or when the address is on a suppression / hard-bounce list. Failed bubbles show a Retry button. What clicking it does:- Re-sends the same subject and body under a new dedup key — so the original failure won’t block the new attempt while still preventing accidental double-sends if Mailgun actually accepted the original.
- Only retries when the failure looks recoverable. Suppressions, hard bounces, and “invalid recipient” errors are skipped with a clear message — fix the underlying issue (lift the suppression, correct the address) before retrying.
- Caps at three retries per message so a stuck button can’t spiral.
Sending domain warnings
If the Inbox shows an amber banner across the top — “Sending domain … is not verified” — manual replies and agent sends will fail until you finish DNS setup. Click Open settings to open the Inbox Settings, where the Domain tab walks you through the SPF / DKIM / DMARC steps. See Outreach Email Setup for the end-to-end walkthrough, including registrar-specific DNS instructions.Forward address
During setup, a card at the top of the conversation list shows your inbound bucket address — the one you give to teammates for forwarding pitches and the one you can plug into a vanity address likeseo@yourdomain.com. Click Copy to grab it without leaving the page. You can always find (and Rotate) this address under Settings → Inbox → Forward emails to your agent. Full setup steps live in Email Forwarding for the Outreach Agent.
Keyboard shortcuts
The Inbox is built for keyboard-first triage. Shortcuts are active whenever you’re not focused on a text field.Realtime updates
The Inbox refreshes itself live — new inbound mail, agent sends, opens, and clicks all appear without a manual refresh. If your network or browser blocks the live connection, the Inbox falls back to a 30-second poll so it never goes more than half a minute stale.Related
- Email Forwarding for the Outreach Agent — set up the bucket address (and friendly vanity addresses).
- Outreach Email Setup — end-to-end setup: dedicated outreach domain, DNS records, inbox setup, and the forwarding relay that routes replies to your real mailbox while keeping the agent in the loop.
- Outreach Opportunities — the broader Outreach Agent surface, including author email lookup and pitch drafting.