Reviewing and Sending Messages

Why It Matters

Every outreach email Kit sends requires your approval first. This human-in-the-loop approach ensures nothing goes out that doesn’t meet your standards. You control the quality, tone, and accuracy of every message before it reaches a prospect’s inbox.

Draft Review Workflow

When the AI finishes researching a prospect, the draft appears in your review queue. Follow-up drafts land in the same queue as each sequence step comes due, so approving a follow-up works exactly like approving the first email. You have three options:

• Approve — Queue the email for sending. Kit sends it during the next available sending window.
• Edit — Modify the subject or body before approving. The AI’s draft is your starting point, not the final word.
• Reject — Send the draft back for revision. The message returns to pending status and its approval is cleared, so it leaves the review queue. The prospect’s own status is unchanged, and the drafted subject and body are kept. Reject is available only while the message is still a draft — once it has been sent, it can’t be regressed.

Navigate to your campaign’s messages tab or the global Outreach > Drafts page to review pending drafts.

Bulk Operations

The browser keeps approval on the full-message review screen so you see the complete recipient, sender, subject, and body before each decision. For a large, trusted set, the Outreach Agent presents bounded pages of up to 25 complete drafts. Each page has its own confirmation bound to the unchanged messages; a cursor leads to the next page, preventing a huge campaign from overwhelming the review context or one database transaction.

The global drafts page at Outreach > Drafts shows pending drafts across all campaigns, grouped by campaign name. This is useful when you have multiple active campaigns and want to review everything in one place.

Message Statuses

Each message moves through these statuses:

Status	Meaning
Pending	The AI hasn’t produced a draft yet — also where a rejected draft lands
Drafted	AI has written the email. Awaiting your review.
Approved	You approved the draft. Queued for sending.
Sent	Kit transmitted the email to your SMTP server
Delivered	Recipient’s mail server accepted the message
Bounced	Delivery failed — the recipient address was rejected
Failed	A known authentication, sender, content, or policy problem stopped delivery and must be fixed
Attempts exhausted	All four delivery attempts failed before submission with a temporary error. Kit will not retry automatically.
Delivery unknown	SMTP acceptance could not be proven. The message may have sent, so Kit will not resend automatically.
Review required	The approved recipient, sender identity, subject, or body changed before SMTP started. Kit stopped the send so you can review and approve the current version again.

Engagement Indicators

When engagement tracking is enabled on a campaign, sent messages show additional information:

• Messages list — Small icons appear next to the status badge: a violet eye for opened messages, a blue link icon for clicked. Hover for the count.
• Message detail — An Engagement card in the sidebar shows open/click counts, first-event timestamps, and a timeline of the 10 most recent events with clicked URLs.

These indicators use counter-cache columns on the message — no extra queries when loading the messages list.

Sending Pipeline

After you approve a draft, Kit handles delivery automatically:

• Randomized delays: by default Kit spaces outgoing emails 7 to 14 minutes apart so messages are not all sent at once. The minimum and maximum delay are configurable from 1 to 60 minutes in SMTP settings.
• Daily cap: the default daily cap is 50 emails per day per account, configurable up to 500 in SMTP settings. This limits sending volume; it does not guarantee inbox placement.
• Suppression check — Before sending, Kit verifies the prospect’s email isn’t on your suppression list (from bounces, unsubscribes, or manual additions)
• List-Unsubscribe — By default, outgoing emails include RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers. You can disable these headers in SMTP settings for personalized cold email

Kit automatically retries only failures known to have happened before message submission, such as a DNS, route, or connection refusal. A message receives four total attempts (the initial attempt plus three retries); if the same safe-to-retry failure remains, it moves to Attempts exhausted and stops. A timeout, reset, broken pipe, or TLS disconnect whose SMTP acceptance cannot be proven moves to Delivery unknown without an automatic resend, because retrying could duplicate the email. Known authentication, sender, content, and policy failures move to Failed.

Open Outreach > Deliverability to review Delivery unknown, Attempts exhausted, and Failed messages. For Delivery unknown, inspect the attempt evidence and provider logs using the RFC Message-ID. Absence from the Sent folder alone does not prove that the email was not sent. For Failed, fix the authentication, sender, content, or policy problem before authorizing one new attempt. A Review required message never reached SMTP; open it, review the current delivery details, and approve it again.

Resolving a Stopped Delivery

Every Delivery unknown, Attempts exhausted, or Failed message stays in the delivery review queue until a member who can manage the campaign records an audited decision:

Decision	Use It When	Result
Confirm sent	Provider evidence confirms the message was accepted	Marks the message sent without another SMTP attempt
Confirm not sent	A human checked provider evidence and confirmed the message was not accepted	Returns the message to approved and queues one delivery attempt
Retry after fix	A known sender problem caused safe retries to run out and you fixed it	Returns the message to approved and queues one delivery attempt
Close review	You want to stop investigating without sending	Keeps the technical delivery status and closes the review

Confirm sent and Confirm not sent are available only for Delivery unknown. Retry after fix is the safe recovery for Attempts exhausted and Failed after the underlying problem is resolved. Close review is always available when you do not want another send.

Never choose Confirm not sent from an error message alone—the original SMTP connection may have dropped after the provider accepted the email. Review the exact attempt evidence, including SMTP stage and response, diagnostic, timestamps, and RFC Message-ID. The confirmation is bound to that attempt and evidence; retry confirmations are also bound to the reviewed recipient, sender identity, subject, and body. If any of them changes, Kit expires the confirmation and requires a fresh review instead of applying a stale decision.

Each decision is immutable, records who resolved it and when while that user record is retained, and can carry an optional encrypted audit note. If that user is later erased, the decision remains but its resolver ID becomes null.

Activating a Campaign

New campaigns start in draft status. To begin sending:

1. Verify your SMTP credentials are configured and verified
2. Add at least one prospect
3. Set the campaign status to Active

Once active, Kit begins researching prospects and generating drafts. You can pause the campaign at any time to stop automatic sending of approved messages. Pausing does not lock the campaign down — you can still trigger research and drafting on pending prospects manually, and existing drafts remain available for review. Resume to restart automatic sending.

Quick Checklist

• Review drafts in your campaign or the global drafts page
• Approve, edit, or reject each draft
• Set your campaign to Active to begin the sending pipeline
• Monitor sent messages for bounce or failure notifications
• Resolve Delivery unknown, Attempts exhausted, and Failed reviews from their recorded evidence

Next Steps

• Handling Replies — manage prospect responses and AI-drafted replies
• Suppressions, Bounces, and Deliverability — understand bounce handling and sender reputation