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Outreach etiquette

How Area O1 sends email on your behalf, and how to use it without wearing out the people you write to.

Nothing goes out without you

Area O1 writes drafts: yours, the agent's, the follow-up job's, a letter draft for a writer, or a check-in to an event organizer. Drafts wait on the Contacts page. Nothing is sent until you press Approve & send.

  1. Open Contacts and read the draft in full.
  2. Edit the subject and body until it sounds like you.
  3. Press Approve & send.
  4. For the next 10 seconds you can press Undo send to stop it. After that it's sent from your Gmail.

Rules are checked the moment you approve, so a refusal shows right away instead of after the undo window:

  • Email goes only to your case contacts, at an address saved on the contact.
  • Gmail must be connected (Settings > Gmail).
  • You must be under today's send limit.

If Gmail doesn't accept a send, the email stays a draft and the failure is listed on Contacts.

The daily send limit

By default Area O1 sends at most 10 emails a day. The Contacts page shows how many went out today. The limit is outreach.daily_limit in areao1.yaml (0 to 100). When you reach it, the message says the limit resets tomorrow.

outreach:
  daily_limit: 10
  follow_up_days: 7

Keep it low. A limit you never hit is a good sign.

Follow-ups

When you wrote last in a thread with a contact and they've been quiet for outreach.follow_up_days days (7 by default), the google job drafts one short follow-up in the same thread. There's at most one follow-up draft per message of yours, and it's a plain template: make it personal before you approve it, or delete it.

  • One gentle follow-up is usually enough. If there's still no answer, let it go or try another way to reach them.
  • A deadline is a fair reason to follow up sooner. Say what you need and by when.

Check-ins to organizers

When the daily opportunity check finds an invitation it can't confirm, it drafts a short check-in to the organizer and adds them to Contacts. When the sender looks suspicious (a failed sender check or a look-alike domain), nothing is drafted, so you never confirm a phisher's address. See Daily opportunity check.

Before approving a check-in:

  • Make sure the invitation is one you'd accept if it's real.
  • Keep it short: who you are, which event, and a simple question.
  • Don't send a check-in for every newsletter or platform digest.

Respect people's time

  • Write to people you have a real reason to contact. Area O1 only writes to case contacts, but who counts as a contact is up to you.
  • Ask for one thing per email, and make it easy to say no.
  • Thank people when they help, whether or not it counts for your case.
  • Never ask someone to judge, review or write for you just to fill a criterion. Ask because the work is real.
  • Keep letters, asks and follow-ups in Area O1 so you don't write to the same person twice by accident.