Handling Replies

Why It Matters

Replies are the goal of every outreach campaign. When a prospect responds, the speed and quality of your follow-up determines whether interest converts into a meeting or fades away. Kit surfaces replies immediately, classifies their sentiment, and can even draft a response for you.

How Reply Detection Works

Kit polls your IMAP inbox every 5 minutes. When a new message arrives, Kit matches it to an outreach conversation using two signals:

• In-Reply-To header — The email standard for threading. Kit checks whether the incoming message references a Message-ID from a sent outreach email.
• Sender verification — Kit confirms the sender’s email matches a prospect in an active campaign.

Both signals must match for Kit to associate the reply with a prospect. Unmatched emails are ignored.

Reply Inbox

Navigate to Outreach > Replies to see the replies that need a human. The inbox leaves out auto-classified bounces and out-of-office messages entirely — that exclusion applies to the whole inbox, not to one filter. Replies Kit couldn’t classify still appear, so a failed sentiment analysis never hides a lead.

The inbox supports two filters:

• All — Every triageable reply across all campaigns (bounces and out-of-office messages are still excluded)
• Needs Attention — Triageable replies that haven’t been actioned yet

Bounces and out-of-office replies are not lost: they stay on the prospect’s conversation thread, and hard bounces feed Suppressions, Bounces, and Deliverability.

By default replies are sorted by priority: interested first, then positive, then negative, with replies Kit couldn’t classify last. Switch the sort to Newest to order by arrival time instead.

Sentiment Classification

Kit’s AI automatically classifies each reply into one of five sentiments:

Sentiment	Meaning	Example
Positive	Prospect is interested and wants to continue the conversation	“This sounds great, let’s set up a call.”
Interested	Prospect wants more information before committing	“Can you tell me more about pricing?”
Negative	Prospect is not interested or asks to stop	“Not a fit for us right now.”
OOO	Out-of-office auto-reply	“I’m out of the office until March 20.”
Bounce	Delivery failure notification (DSN)	“This mailbox is full.” / “User unknown.”

Sentiment classification drives the reply inbox twice over: OOO and bounce replies are filtered out of the inbox altogether, and the remaining ones are ranked interested → positive → negative so you can respond to the warmest leads first.

Triage Actions

From the reply inbox, you can take these actions on each reply:

Action	What It Does
Reply	Open the response editor to write and send a reply
Dismiss	Archive the reply — it moves out of the “Needs Attention” filter
Opt Out	Mark the prospect as opted out and add them to your suppression list
Undo Dismiss	Restore a dismissed reply back to “Needs Attention”

AI-Drafted Responses

When auto-response is enabled in a campaign’s AI directives, Kit’s AI drafts a suggested response for each reply. The draft includes a recommended action and reasoning.

Suggested actions the AI may recommend:

Suggested Action	When It’s Used
Send details	Prospect asked a question — share pricing, role details, or answer what they asked
Schedule meeting	Prospect expressed interest in a call or demo; the draft embeds a booking link
Do not contact	Prospect asked to be removed or made clear they’re not interested
Needs human review	The reply needs a person — e.g., a factual product question the AI can’t confirm
No action needed	Prospect declined politely and there’s nothing useful to send back

AI-drafted responses still require your approval before sending. You can edit the draft, write your own response, or dismiss the suggestion entirely.

To enable auto-response, set Auto-response to on in the campaign’s AI directives and optionally provide Response instructions to guide the AI’s tone and approach.

Conversation Threading

Each prospect’s page shows the full conversation thread — your outreach emails, their replies, and any responses you’ve sent. Navigate to a prospect from the campaign’s prospects tab to see the complete history.

Quick Checklist

• Verify IMAP is configured and polling (check Outreach > Settings)
• Review replies in Outreach > Replies
• Triage each reply: respond, dismiss, or opt out
• Enable auto-response on campaigns where you want AI-drafted replies
• Check the prospect page for full conversation context before responding

Next Steps

• Suppressions, Bounces, and Deliverability — manage opt-outs and bounces
• Creating Campaigns — configure auto-response and AI directives for reply handling