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Overview

The Outreach Agent sends real outreach mail on your behalf. Setting it up cleanly is what protects the deliverability of every other email your business sends — receipts, password resets, newsletters, customer support — and what lets recipients reply to a real person at your team rather than a Sight AI relay address. The agent does two jobs, and they have different domain needs:
  • Cold outreach (the Outreach tab) — proactively pitching prospects who’ve never heard from you. This is the risky one for deliverability, so it belongs on a dedicated domain, never your main brand domain. It’s the same playbook lemlist and Instantly drill into every user: isolate cold sending so it can’t drag your primary domain down.
  • Reply handling (the Agent tab) — answering people who emailed you first: forwarded cold pitches and inbound replies. This is warm, expected mail, so your existing main domain is perfectly fine here. Nobody flags a reply to a conversation they started.
The setup is a positioned five-step flow that touches your domain registrar, your email provider, and Sight AI:
  1. Register a fresh, dedicated domain just for outreach and create a personal mailbox on it (we recommend Google Workspace).
  2. Add Mailgun’s DNS records to your domain so we can send authenticated mail.
  3. Verify the domain in Sight AI (DNS propagation usually takes 5–30 minutes, occasionally a few hours).
  4. Configure inbox setup in Sight AI so replies land in your real mailbox instead of the Sight AI Inbox.
  5. Forward a copy of every incoming reply back to Sight AI so the agent can triage and follow up.
Plan for ~30 minutes of hands-on work plus some DNS propagation wait time. You won’t need to babysit the wait — start it once and come back when DNS resolves.
This is a one-time setup per site. Once it’s done, the agent sends and receives indefinitely with no further configuration.

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Step 1 · Register a new dedicated domain (and create a mailbox)

The first and most important rule: don’t reuse your main brand domain. Cold outreach generates bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes at rates your transactional and customer-facing mail never does. Those signals follow the domain — a few weeks of cold sending can quietly poison deliverability for your password resets, receipts, newsletters, and customer support replies. The pattern we recommend is same name, different TLD — a fresh registration that reads like your brand but lives on its own DNS island. Avoid -outreach, -mail, or similar suffixes — they read as a marketing domain to recipients and undermine the personal-feeling From line we’re trying to build. Register the domain at any reputable registrar (GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Namecheap, Squarespace Domains, Hover, Name.com — they’re all fine).
Do not reuse your primary product domain (or a subdomain of it) as the outbound domain, even if it already has SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured. Cold outreach generates bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes at rates your transactional mail never does, and those signals follow the domain. A dedicated outbound domain is the only way to keep one from poisoning the other.
The exception — warm reply handling. This dedicated-domain rule is about cold outreach. If you’re only using the agent to reply to people who emailed you first — forwarded pitches and inbound replies handled on the Agent tab, with the Outreach tab left off — that’s warm, expected mail, and your existing main domain is perfectly fine. The reputation risk comes from cold sending, not from answering someone who already reached out. One caveat: the agent sends everything from a single assigned domain, so if you’ll run cold outreach at all, make that one domain the dedicated one.
Once the domain is registered, set up email on it. Google Workspace ($6/user/month) is what we recommend — it’s the most reliable, gives you a real Gmail-style inbox UI, and the forwarding rule that closes the loop in Step 5 is a single setting. Other options that work fine:
  • Microsoft 365 — solid alternative; the forwarding setup is a couple more clicks.
  • Cloudflare Email Routing (free) — forward-only, no inbox UI of its own. Use this if you only need a forwarding address and have a separate inbox to forward into.
  • Zoho Mail (free tier available) — solid budget option.
  • Fastmail — paid, well-regarded for deliverability.
Whichever you pick, create a real personal mailbox using a real first name — john.smith@trysightai.com, not outreach@trysightai.com or hello@trysightai.com. Cold outreach replies far better when the From line reads as a person rather than a sales tool. This same mailbox becomes your Reply-To in Step 4 and the source of the forwarding rule in Step 5, so set it up once and you’ll reuse it across the rest of the flow.
Don’t reuse your everyday inbox for the outreach mailbox. The forwarding rule in Step 5 sends a copy of every incoming message to Sight AI — non-outreach mail is silently discarded, but giving Sight AI access to your daily inbox is unnecessary and surfaces a privacy footprint you don’t need.

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Step 2 · Add Mailgun’s DNS records

In Sight AI, open the Inbox, click Settings in the header, and open the Domain tab to add the dedicated outreach domain you just registered. (You can keep more than one domain in the pool; the agent sends from the single domain you Assign.) Sight AI provisions it in Mailgun and surfaces a table of DNS records you’ll paste into your domain registrar: Each row in the dashboard has a copy button so you can paste the values into your registrar verbatim. The starter DMARC record looks like:
p=none is monitor-only mode — no legitimate mail is rejected while you’re still dialling things in. Tighten it to p=quarantine or p=reject once your DMARC reports confirm everything legitimate is passing alignment. Mailgun only provisions SPF and DKIM. DMARC is not generated, not verified, and not enforced by Mailgun, but every major inbox checks it — skipping it is the single most common reason cold outreach from a brand-new domain ends up in spam.

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Add the records at your registrar

The fields are universal across registrars even if the UI labels differ. Pick yours:

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GoDaddy

  1. Sign in and go to My Products → Domains, then click DNS next to your outreach domain.
  2. For each Sight AI record, click Add New Record.
  3. Type = TXT or CNAME (match the row in Sight AI).
  4. Name = the host part only. GoDaddy splits the host from the domain — for smtp._domainkey.yourdomain.com enter smtp._domainkey; for the apex SPF record enter @; for _dmarc.yourdomain.com enter _dmarc; for the tracking CNAME email.yourdomain.com enter email.
  5. Value = paste from Sight AI exactly. Don’t add quotes — GoDaddy adds them automatically for TXT records.
  6. TTL = 1 hour (or default).
  7. Save.
GoDaddy DNS changes typically propagate in 5–10 minutes.

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Cloudflare

  1. From the Cloudflare dashboard, open the zone for your outreach domain.
  2. Go to DNS → Records → Add record.
  3. For each Sight AI record:
    • Type = TXT or CNAME.
    • Name = the subdomain part. Cloudflare auto-strips the apex — for smtp._domainkey.yourdomain.com enter smtp._domainkey; for the apex SPF, enter @.
    • Content / Target = paste from Sight AI verbatim.
    • Proxy status = DNS only (the grey cloud, not the orange one). Mailgun’s records must not be proxied.
    • TTL = Auto.
  4. Save.
Cloudflare DNS changes are typically live within seconds.

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Namecheap

  1. Sign in and go to Domain List, then click Manage next to your outreach domain.
  2. Open the Advanced DNS tab.
  3. For each Sight AI record, click Add New Record.
  4. Type = TXT Record or CNAME Record.
  5. Host = the host part (e.g. smtp._domainkey, email, _dmarc, or @ for apex SPF).
  6. Value = paste from Sight AI.
  7. TTL = Automatic.
  8. Click the green checkmark to save each row.
Namecheap typically propagates in 30 minutes.

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Google Domains / Squarespace Domains

(Google Domains migrated to Squarespace in mid-2024 — same UI underneath.)
  1. Sign in to Squarespace Domains and select your outreach domain.
  2. Go to DNS → Custom records.
  3. Click Add record for each row from Sight AI.
  4. Match the type, host, and value exactly. For host, use the subdomain part only (smtp._domainkey, email, _dmarc, or @).
  5. Save.
Propagation is usually under 30 minutes.

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Other providers (Hover, Name.com, Bluehost, DreamHost, AWS Route 53, etc.)

The fields map cleanly across registrars even when the labels differ:
  • Type — match what Sight AI shows (TXT or CNAME).
  • Name / Host / Hostname — the subdomain part. For smtp._domainkey.<your-domain> use smtp._domainkey; for the apex SPF use @; for the tracking CNAME use email; for DMARC use _dmarc.
  • Value / Target / Points to / Content — copy from Sight AI verbatim.
  • TTL — leave default.
If your registrar requires a fully qualified name, append your domain to the host (e.g. smtp._domainkey.trysightai.com); otherwise use the host part only.

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Step 3 · Verify the domain in Sight AI

Once the records are in your registrar, head back to Inbox → Settings → Domain and click Verify DNS. Mailgun re-checks DNS and flips each record from pending to ok. Once it verifies, click Assign to make it the domain the agent sends from (a freshly verified domain can be auto-assigned for you).
Heads up on timing: DNS propagation usually takes 5–30 minutes, but it can take a few hours depending on your registrar (and longer still if you’re updating records that previously had a long TTL). If verification doesn’t pass on the first click, give it 30 minutes and try again — there’s nothing to babysit. Once all records flip to Valid, the domain is verified and you can move on to Step 4.
The agent refuses to send until SPF, DKIM, and the tracking CNAME all resolve, so getting this step done is what unlocks everything downstream. DMARC isn’t required for verification but is strongly recommended before running real campaigns.

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Step 4 · Configure inbox setup in Sight AI

With the sending domain verified and assigned, open the Inbox tab in Inbox → Settings (the inbox setup card). This is where you tell Sight AI which mailbox you want recipients to reply to, and where you’ll wire the relay back to the agent in Step 5. The card walks through three substeps in order — the in-app instructions are intentionally close to what you see here:
Inbox setup card showing the Reply-To address, the forwarding address, and the Send test email button

The inbox setup card in the Inbox settings, under the Inbox tab.

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Step 1 in the card · Reply-To address

Paste the personal mailbox you created in Step 1 (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com) into the Reply-To field and click Save. Use the same mailbox you set up in Step 1 — that single address is your Reply-To, your From line, and the source of the forwarding rule in Step 5, so reusing it keeps everything pointed at one place. The agent doesn’t go live with this Reply-To yet — it’ll keep using the platform Reply-To until verification succeeds in Step 3 of the card so an in-flight setup never silently drops a reply.

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Step 2 in the card · Forwarding address

Sight AI displays a forwarding address that looks like forward+ABC123XYZ@mail-sightai.com. Copy it — you’ll paste it into your mailbox provider as part of Step 5 below.

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Step 3 in the card · Send test email

Hold off on clicking Send test email until you’ve finished Step 5 below. Once your forwarding rule is wired up and confirmed, click it and the card will flip to Active automatically as soon as the forwarded copy returns to Sight AI.

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Step 5 · Set up email forwarding from your mailbox

This is the rule that closes the loop: every incoming message in your outreach mailbox gets forwarded to the Sight AI address you copied in Step 4. Replies still land in your own inbox, and the agent sees a copy. The setup steps differ by mail provider — pick yours.

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Gmail / Google Workspace

  1. Sign in to the dedicated outreach mailbox (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com) in Gmail, click the gear icon → See all settings.
  2. Open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
  3. Click Add a forwarding address and paste the Sight AI forwarding address from the Inbox setup card.
  4. Gmail sends a confirmation email to the Sight AI forwarding address. Sight AI receives it and surfaces it as a new conversation in your Inbox tab — open it and click Confirm forwarding in Google to authorize the forward:
    Sight AI Inbox showing the Google forwarding confirmation email with the Confirm forwarding in Google link highlighted

    The Gmail confirmation email arrives in your Sight AI Inbox. Click Confirm forwarding in Google to authorize the relay.

  5. Back in Gmail’s Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to and select your Sight AI address. In the second dropdown, pick the keep [your mailbox]‘s copy in the Inbox option (Gmail substitutes your mailbox’s display name into the label) so your original mail stays intact, then click Save Changes:
    Gmail Forwarding and POP/IMAP settings with Forward a copy of incoming mail to selected and Save Changes button highlighted

    In Gmail, choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to your Sight AI address, keep the local copy in the Inbox, and Save Changes.

  6. Now jump back to the Inbox setup card in Sight AI and click Send test email. The probe arrives in your outreach mailbox, the forwarding rule sends a copy back to Sight AI, and the card flips to Active automatically.
Make sure you pick the keep [your mailbox]‘s copy in the Inbox option in Gmail (or the equivalent in your provider) — not archive, delete, or mark-as-read. The forward should be a copy, not a redirect, otherwise your replies disappear from your own inbox.

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Microsoft 365 / Outlook

  1. Sign in to the dedicated outreach mailbox in Outlook on the web and click the gear icon.
  2. Go to Mail → Forwarding.
  3. Check Enable forwarding and paste the Sight AI forwarding address from the Inbox setup card.
  4. Make sure Keep a copy of forwarded messages is checked.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Back in Sight AI, click Send test email in the Inbox setup card.

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Cloudflare Email Routing (no mailbox required)

If your dedicated outreach domain is on Cloudflare’s free Email Routing:
  1. In Cloudflare, open the zone for your outreach domain (e.g. trysightai.com, not your main brand domain) and go to Email → Email Routing.
  2. Under Destination addresses, add the Sight AI forwarding address from the Inbox setup card. Cloudflare sends a verification link — open the resulting conversation in your Sight AI Inbox tab and click through to confirm.
  3. Under Custom addresses, create a route: Custom address = your outreach mailbox address (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com) → Action = Send to → the Sight AI forwarding address.
  4. Back in Sight AI, click Send test email in the Inbox setup card.
Cloudflare Email Routing is the easiest option if you don’t want to pay for a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 seat — Sight AI handles all sending through your verified outbound domain anyway, so the mailbox is purely for receiving and forwarding replies. If you want to be able to log in and read those replies in a real inbox UI, point Cloudflare’s forward at any existing inbox (your personal Gmail, your team’s shared inbox, etc.).

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Zoho, Fastmail, cPanel, and other providers

Most providers expose a basic forwarder under Email Forwarders, Aliases, or similar:
  1. Source: your outreach mailbox (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com)
  2. Destination: the Sight AI forwarding address from the Inbox setup card
  3. Save, confirm any verification email Sight AI surfaces in your Inbox, then click Send test email in the Inbox setup card.
If your provider supports SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme), leave it on — it keeps the original sender’s domain intact for SPF on the forward. Most modern providers do this automatically.

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How replies are detected

Every outbound email the agent sends carries a unique Message-Id header. When someone replies, the reply carries an In-Reply-To header with that same value. The agent uses this header match to know which conversation a forwarded email belongs to. When inbox setup is active, matched replies are threaded to the existing Sight AI conversation first. Mail that doesn’t match an existing conversation still follows the Email Forwarding intake flow: it can land as a new Inbox thread, and the Auto-handle forwarded and inbound emails setting controls whether the agent triages it automatically or waits for you.

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What happens once everything is Active

  • Outbound mail uses your Reply-To address. Recipients see john.smith@trysightai.com (or whichever personal mailbox you chose) and have no way to know Sight AI is in the loop.
  • Replies land in your own mailbox like normal email.
  • The agent sees a copy of those replies via the forward and triages them: drafts a follow-up if appropriate, marks the thread resolved, or flags it for your attention. Everything still appears in the Inbox tab.
  • New forwarded or direct inbound mail that isn’t a reply can create a new Inbox thread. If auto-handle is on, the agent triages it before deciding whether to reply; if auto-handle is off, it waits for your review.

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Privacy and security

  • Matched replies are resolved by headers first. We read In-Reply-To and References to identify Sight AI conversations before treating an email as a new inbound thread.
  • Sender verification. When a forwarded message matches an outbound-initiated conversation, we check that the sender matches the contact enrolled in that conversation. Replies from unrelated addresses are dropped.
  • Per-site forwarding address. Each site has its own rotatable forwarding token, so a leaked address never grants access to other sites or other workspaces.
  • Team-scoped matching. Forwarded replies can never interact with conversations from other teams.
If you suspect your forwarding address has leaked, click Rotate in the Forward emails to your agent card (under Inbox → Settings → Inbox). The old address stops accepting mail immediately — update your forwarding rule to point at the new address afterwards.

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Troubleshooting

The Inbox setup card doesn’t flip to Active after I click Send test email. Wait a couple of minutes — the probe → forward → relay round-trip is usually under 30 seconds but can take a minute or two on cold mailboxes. Then check, in order:
  1. Did the test email actually arrive in your outreach mailbox? Look in Spam or Promotions too — first emails to a new domain occasionally land there. If it’s not there at all, your sending domain probably hasn’t fully verified yet (re-check Step 3).
  2. Did your forwarding rule fire? In Gmail, the Forwarding and POP/IMAP page shows your active forward. In Outlook, check Mail → Forwarding. In Cloudflare, check Email → Email Routing → Routes.
  3. Did you confirm the forward? Gmail and Cloudflare both require a one-time confirmation step (Step 5 above). If you skipped it, the forwarding rule is configured but inactive.
You can re-click Send test email as many times as you need. Each click invalidates the previous probe and starts fresh. DNS verification keeps failing. DNS propagation usually takes 5–30 minutes but can occasionally take a few hours, especially if you previously had stale records on the domain with long TTLs. Wait 30 minutes and click Verify DNS again. If it still fails after a few hours:
  • Confirm the records are exactly what Sight AI shows — case-sensitive, no trailing spaces, no added quotes.
  • For TXT records, check that your registrar didn’t double-quote the value (Cloudflare and Namecheap both add quotes automatically; pasting them in yourself produces ""v=spf1 ...").
  • For CNAME records, confirm Cloudflare’s proxy is off (grey cloud, not orange).
Replies are landing in my mailbox but the agent isn’t replying. That can mean either (a) the agent’s auto-reply behaviour is paused for that thread (check the right rail in the Inbox), or (b) the forwarding rule isn’t actually copying messages back to Sight AI. Send a test reply to one of your own outbound emails and check whether it shows up in the Sight AI Inbox tab within a minute. If it doesn’t, re-walk Step 5.

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FAQ

Only if you don’t set up inbox setup. With a verified Reply-To configured, recipients see your real personal address (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com) and have no way to know Sight AI is in the loop.
Outreach still sends and replies still arrive — they’ll just show up in the Sight AI Inbox tab instead of your personal inbox. The agent triages and replies the same way.
Cold outreach generates bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes at rates your transactional and customer-facing mail never does. If you reuse your main brand domain for outreach, those signals follow the domain — and a few weeks of cold sending can quietly degrade deliverability for your password resets, receipts, newsletters, and customer support replies. A similar-looking outreach domain on a different TLD (e.g. trysightai.com if your main is trysight.ai) keeps prospects feeling like they’re talking to your team while keeping the reputation hit isolated. This is the same approach lemlist and Instantly build their whole onboarding around: keep cold sending off your primary domain.
Yes. The dedicated-domain rule exists to protect you from cold sending. If you’re only using the agent to reply to people who contacted you first — forwarded cold pitches and inbound replies on the Agent tab — that’s warm, expected mail and your main domain is perfectly fine. The moment you turn on cold outreach (the Outreach tab), switch to a dedicated domain: the agent sends every email from one assigned domain, so once cold pitches are in the mix, that domain needs to be the dedicated one to keep your primary domain’s reputation safe.
Cold mail replies far better when the From line reads as a person. A reply from john.smith@trysightai.com looks like a real person at Sight AI sent you a thoughtful note. A reply from outreach@trysightai.com reads as a sales tool — recipients pattern-match it against the dozens of cold mass emails they’ve already deleted today and your reply rate drops accordingly. Use a real personal name (yours or whoever the agent is “speaking as”) for the local-part of both your From line and your Reply-To.
Use a dedicated personal mailbox on your dedicated outreach domain (e.g. john.smith@trysightai.com). The forwarding rule sends a copy of every incoming email to Sight AI. We discard everything that isn’t a Sight AI reply, but you generally don’t want a non-Sight AI service receiving copies of your daily mail. A separate mailbox on the separate outreach domain keeps the privacy surface area minimal.
No. Cloudflare Email Routing is free and lets you create john.smith@trysightai.com as a forward-only address — you don’t need a paid mailbox seat at all. The downside is you can’t send mail from that address through Cloudflare, but Sight AI handles all sending through your verified outbound domain anyway, so the mailbox is purely for receiving and forwarding replies. If you want to be able to log in and read those replies in a real inbox UI, point Cloudflare’s forward at any existing inbox (your personal Gmail, your team’s shared inbox, etc.). Google Workspace is what we recommend for most teams because the Gmail UI is excellent for actually reading and replying to threads, but Cloudflare is a perfectly valid free alternative.
Usually 5–30 minutes. Occasionally a few hours, especially if you previously had records on the domain with long TTLs. The dashboard shows per-record status when you click Verify DNS; there’s nothing to babysit while DNS propagates — start the records, walk away, come back when you have time.
No. Emails are still sent through Sight AI’s verified outbound domain. Inbox setup only changes how replies find their way back to the agent — not how outbound mail leaves.
First confirm the test email actually arrived in your Reply-To mailbox — sometimes the first email from a new domain lands in Spam. If it’s there, your forwarding rule didn’t fire. Re-check the rule’s filter (some providers default to forwarding only mail matching specific addresses) and that you confirmed the forward (Gmail and Cloudflare both require a one-time confirmation click). You can click Send test email again to retry.
Direct mail without a matching In-Reply-To can still become a new Inbox thread through the forwarding intake path. Keep Auto-handle forwarded and inbound emails on if you want the agent to triage those messages automatically, or turn it off if you want direct inbound to wait for review.
Yes. Click Remove on the Inbox setup card (under Inbox → Settings → Inbox). The agent immediately reverts to its platform Reply-To and replies start landing in the Sight AI Inbox tab again.
Yes, if you forward new mail into your agent address or your Reply-To mailbox forwards a new direct inbound message. Matched replies are threaded first; unmatched authenticated mail can create a new Inbox thread, subject to daily caps and your auto-handle setting.