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A cap you can talk past is not a cap. A new sender starts at 10 a day, earns 10 more each week, and stops at 50. Once the day’s quota is used nothing more sends; the step stays due until midnight. Mail leaves through a pool of sender identities: OneShot sending domains, your own Gmail or Workspace accounts, and Smartlead-hosted mailboxes, in any mix.

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Adding identities

  • OneShot domain and mailbox. Setup, or identities add. Pick a provisioned domain or type a new one; it is provisioned on first send. domains list, pause and resume manage them.
  • Gmail or Workspace. gmail auth, a one-time OAuth. It needs a Google Cloud Desktop client with the Gmail API on.
  • Smartlead. smartlead connect, or Setup. Smartlead warms and hosts the mailbox. GTM sends through the mailbox’s own SMTP when its credentials resolve, and through the Smartlead API otherwise. doctor names every mailbox still on the API and the command that switches it: identities send-via <id> smtp.
identities test-send <id> --to [email protected] --dry-run shows what a test would send.

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The rules

  • One sender per person. Every email to a prospect comes from the identity that sent the first one, across plays and steps.
  • Ramp. 10 a day, plus 10 a week, to 50. Editable per identity on Setup. Mailboxes on one OneShot domain share one ramp within a workspace, because reputation belongs to the domain. Two workspaces on the same domain each count their own, so give each workspace its own domain. Gmail and Smartlead mailboxes ramp per account, and a Smartlead mailbox never exceeds its own Smartlead limit.
  • Defer, never exceed. Capacity is reserved before a send starts, so two sends at once cannot both take the last slot. At the cap, steps stay due and rows stay approved.
  • One person, one product at a time. A workspace does not first-touch someone another workspace emailed in the last 7 days. The draft is flagged contacted-elsewhere. Cadences shows the step as held and a batch skips it. You can override on a single manual send.
  • No duplicates. Each send carries a key for what it is (workspace, play, recipient, step), not its text. A sent email is never sent again. One whose outcome is unknown waits until the Sent folder has been checked, and is retried only as the same message. Where Sent cannot tell, it is flagged for you and not resent.
sends check --since 7d lists every keyed send and what the Sent folder showed. Sends through the Smartlead API carry no key, so their copies in Sent are counted and a send that appears twice, or not at all, is flagged.

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Replies

The inbox poll reads the OneShot inbox, every authorised Gmail account and every Smartlead mailbox. A reply stops the cadence whichever identity sent. A reply delayed by an outage is picked up later, not lost, and one you already archived still counts. Every inbound is classified. Out-of-office notices, dead-mailbox notices and unsubscribes are recorded and never count as replies. The last two suppress the address for good. A human reply gets one label: interested, question, partnership, meeting, intro, not_now, objection, complaint, not_interested, wrong_person, unsubscribe, pitch_back, auto_reply or other. Only unsubscribe opts the contact out. The label shapes the drafted answer. Reply labels on Setup can route labelling to a classifier that also stores a confidence and marks a weak label “check label”. intel backfill-intent labels older replies; it writes labels and never sends. Answering from Replies sends from the mailbox that received the message and threads correctly. Drafts are grounded: a known prospect’s stored research, an unknown sender’s site, and links only from your product brief. A reply whose outcome is unknown is checked against Sent and never resent on its own. LinkedIn replies stop email cadences too; see LinkedIn.

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Smartlead inboxes

While a workspace’s dashboard runs, it syncs each Smartlead mailbox about once a minute. Smartlead keeps doing warm-up. Replies shows connection status, last sync and import progress. The first import covers 30 days.
  • Connection settings is for a mailbox whose IMAP or SMTP credentials Smartlead does not expose. Both are verified before saving, and stored in the workspace’s mailbox-connections.json, mode 600.
  • Mail that matches no prospect sits under No match, where you can attach it to one.
  • Read, archive and draft state belong to the workspace. They do not change the mailbox.
  • Removing an identity stops its sync and keeps its conversations.

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Deliverability

  • Bounces. Read from connected Gmail mailboxes every 30 minutes. A hard bounce stops the cadence and suppresses the address. A policy block (5.7.x) does not: it is a verdict on the message, not the mailbox. doctor warns above 2% per identity and fails above 5%, once an identity has 20 sends.
  • Inbox placement. gmail placement sends one real message between two of your mailboxes and reports where it landed, with the SPF, DKIM and DMARC verdicts. Run it by hand and rarely; repeated canaries train the receiving filter.