A consent-first email outreach engine

Industry: sales and marketing · Client: our own sales engine · Proof: built and tested, sending opens at launch

The situation

Cold email tools make it easy to send thousands of messages and just as easy to break the Spam Act, burn a domain's reputation or email someone who already said no. For a small team the risk is not volume, it is one careless send.

We wanted outreach that a person stays in charge of, that respects every unsubscribe for good and that keeps a record of the consent and the approval behind every message.

What we built

We built an outreach engine where nothing leaves without a person approving it. Contacts are captured once with their consent recorded and drafts are queued for review. Consent and suppression are checked again at the moment of sending, inside send windows and daily caps that grow slowly.

Every contact has one record per business, with where their consent came from and when. A message can be drafted by a person or by an AI agent, but it only becomes sendable when someone approves it, and approving it checks consent again. Each sending address has its own daily cap that rises gradually, so a new domain warms up instead of being flagged. Unsubscribe links are signed and expire, and an unsubscribe applies everywhere at once. All mail, from receipts to outreach, goes through one sending path that records delivery without keeping the message text.

The pieces we built:

• One contact record per person, with consent recorded and opted-in contacts mirrored to the email list
• Drafts, including ones an AI agent writes, held in an approval queue
• Consent checked when a message is approved and again before it is sent
• Send windows and daily caps per sender that ramp up gradually
• Suppression and signed, expiring unsubscribe links honoured everywhere
• Drip sequences that refuse anyone without consent
• One transactional email path that records delivery and never stores message bodies

The result

The engine is built and tested, with live sending held until the public launch. Every message that leaves will have a person's approval, a valid consent basis and a working unsubscribe link, so outreach can grow without putting the domain or the business at risk.

The same engine runs the welcome and follow-up sequences, which refuse anyone who has not consented, so marketing and sales share one set of rules.

Built with

Python, Django, Celery, PostgreSQL and Next.js, with a transactional email provider.