READ ME FIRST

Sales Email Sequencer — a self-hosted tool that runs polite, persistent, personalised email outreach to business prospects, and stops the moment they reply.

If you have never seen this product before, this page is for you. It explains in plain language what the product is, who it's for, and what living with it looks like. Nothing here requires a technical background; wherever a piece of jargon is unavoidable, it is explained on the spot and again in the glossary at the end.

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How you might be running this

There are two ways people usually meet this product:

• The standalone preview — a single container started with one docker run command. It comes pre-loaded with realistic demo data (campaigns, contacts, replies, dashboards) so you can explore every screen without setting anything up. Perfect for evaluation.
• A production install — your own deployment with your own database, your own sending mailboxes, and your own sign-in. This is the real thing.

Everything below applies to both; where a step only matters for one of them, it says so.

1. Who this is for

• Sales teams and SDRs (sales development representatives — the people whose job is opening conversations with potential customers) who send personalised outreach at a scale no inbox can manage by hand.
• Sales-ops and revenue-ops people who own the tooling, the data hygiene, and the compliance rules behind that outreach.
• Agencies running outbound campaigns on behalf of clients.
• The operator — whoever installs and looks after the software. This product is self-hosted: each customer runs their own private copy. Your prospect data never sits in someone else's shared cloud service.

2. What it does

In one sentence: it sends sequences — pre-written series of emails that go out on a schedule, one prospect at a time, and stop automatically the moment a prospect replies.

Around that core it handles the jobs that make outreach safe and effective:

• Reply detection — incoming replies are matched back to the exact email that prompted them, and an AI assistant classifies each one (interested, not interested, out-of-office, unsubscribe request…) so your team triages a short, sorted list instead of a raw inbox.
• A suppression list — a "never email these people" list that every part of the system checks before sending. Unsubscribes, hard bounces, and opt-outs land there automatically, and nothing gets past it.
• Mailbox protection — every sending mailbox has a daily cap and a "warmup" ramp (new mailboxes start slow and build volume gradually), and the system watches reputation signals, slowing or pausing a mailbox that looks unhealthy rather than burning it.
• Deliverability monitoring — the DNS records that prove your emails are legitimate (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX) are checked per sending domain and re-checked weekly, with results surfaced on a dashboard. The send path re-checks a domain's status before every send and holds mail while the domain is failing, rather than burning your reputation.
• Analytics — opens, clicks, replies, and bounces flow into one event stream, so every dashboard and every per-prospect history agree.

One interim behaviour to be aware of: sensitive operations (connecting mailboxes or CRMs, deleting data, minting API keys) prompt for a "step-up assertion". The automated re-authentication flow is not wired up yet, so in this build any non-empty value is accepted at that prompt.

3. The world it lives in

This is a tool for outbound B2B prospecting — sometimes called cold outreach: a business contacting specific, researched people at other businesses to open a sales conversation. The craft is sending a small number of relevant, personalised messages and following up politely; the sin is blasting thousands of identical messages at strangers. This product is built for the craft, with the compliance rails (consent tracking, one-click unsubscribe, suppression) wired in.

4. Who and what it connects to

Expect this software to touch:

• Your prospects and their inboxes — the outside world it emails. They never log in; they just receive well-timed messages and, if they want out, a one-click unsubscribe that actually works.
• Your email infrastructure — sending happens through mailboxes you connect (SMTP today) on sending domains you control, with a handful of DNS records to set up once.
• Your sign-in provider — logging in is delegated to the platform's central sign-in service (HAP). This app stores no passwords.
• Spreadsheets/CSV files — prospect lists arrive by CSV upload through an import wizard that maps your columns and records each contact's consent basis.
• Your other systems (optional) — webhooks push events (replies, bounces, unsubscribes…) to anything you like; CRM synchronisation is built into the core but its connect flow is preview-status (see above).

Everything — prospects, campaign content, replies, analytics — lives in your own install's database.

5. The first thing to do

Sign in. Open the app's address in a browser and sign in through the platform login. That's genuinely it: the first person to sign in gets the workspace (the shared workspace all your data lives in) created automatically and becomes its owner.

Two honest notes:

• Colleagues just sign in. Anyone registered in your install's identity platform (HAP) tenant is admitted automatically on their first sign-in, at a read-only role (or as an admin, when the identity platform says so). Owners and admins raise roles — and deactivate people — under Settings → Members. The HAP roster is your access list.
• On the standalone preview, demo data is already loaded, so every screen is populated the moment you sign in.

6. Setting up your complete environment

Four steps take a production install from empty to "ready to send". Each is a couple of minutes of work plus, for domains, a wait for DNS. Details live in the linked guides — this is the map, not the manual.

1. Connect sending mailboxes (Settings → Mailboxes). Add each mailbox's SMTP details. Every mailbox gets a conservative daily cap and a warmup ramp automatically. Deep dive: getting-started.md.
2. Register your sending domain (Settings → Sending domains). The app tells you exactly which DNS records to create (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX) and verifies them, then re-verifies weekly. Deep dive: getting-started.md.
3. Import prospects (Prospects → Import). Upload a CSV; the wizard maps your columns to fields and asks for the consent basis you hold for these contacts. Suppressed addresses are skipped automatically, with reasons. Deep dive: user-guide-detailed.md.
4. Build and activate your first sequence (Sequences → New sequence). Name it, set the sending window and days, add steps (each with its own delay, subject, and body; A/B variants if you want them), then enrol a prospect list and activate. Deep dive: user-guide-layman.md.

Optional at any point: webhooks (Settings → Webhooks) to feed events into your other systems — see integration-guide.md. Installing the software itself (rather than using it) is covered in installation-guide.md and production-initialization.md.

Preview note: all of this is pre-done in the standalone preview — explore rather than configure.

7. Day to day

A normal working day in the product looks like:

• Triage replies (Replies). New replies arrive pre-classified with a confidence level; handle the interested ones, confirm the opt-outs. A prospect who replies is automatically stopped from receiving further steps — you never have to race to cancel a follow-up.
• Glance at mailbox health (Analytics → Mailboxes). Reputation scores, caps, and warmup state per mailbox; anything auto-paused is flagged.
• Check the deliverability board (Analytics → Deliverability) for DNS check results per domain.
• Enrol new prospects into running sequences as lists grow.
• Watch the numbers (Analytics): sends, opens, clicks, replies per sequence and per step.

8. Weekly, monthly, long term

• DNS re-verification runs weekly by itself — your job is to look at failures on the deliverability board and fix records when they drift.
• Suppression hygiene: skim the suppression list occasionally (Settings → Suppression); removing an entry is deliberately hard (it requires a fresh step-up sign-in) because removals re-enable contact.
• Data retention: the product enforces retention windows and purges expired data on schedule; individual erasure ("right to be forgotten") is a button on the prospect page. Retention settings live in Settings → Data retention.
• Backups are yours: the application does not back itself up. The operator should back up the database on whatever cadence the business needs — see production-initialization.md.
• As volume grows: revisit daily caps and add mailboxes/domains rather than pushing one mailbox harder; warmup does the pacing for you.

9. What this product is NOT

• Not a newsletter tool. No bulk broadcasts to a general audience; it is built for individually addressed, personalised outreach.
• Not a spam cannon. It will refuse suppressed addresses, throttle unhealthy mailboxes, and record consent — by design, not as options.
• Not a hosted service. There is no shared cloud; you (or your operator) run it, and you own the data.

10. Compliance and your responsibility

The product gives you the mechanics the law expects: a consent basis recorded at import, a working one-click unsubscribe on every message, a compliant sender address, and a suppression list enforced across every send path. What it cannot do is make your outreach lawful by itself — which contacts you may email, under which legal basis, in which countries, remains your responsibility. When in doubt, ask a lawyer, not a dashboard.

11. About this AI-generated core

This application was generated entirely by AI. It is deliberately core only: full working functionality, minimal styling, no branding — a starting point meant to be customised to your company's look and your team's process. If you have domain knowledge and AI skills, you can extend it yourself; if not, the community at wbsp.ai is where to find people who do — and where many variants of this and other applications already live, one of which might fit you even better.

12. Glossary

• Sequence — a planned series of emails sent on a schedule to enrolled prospects.
• Step — one email (or task) within a sequence, with its own delay, subject, and body.
• Prospect — a person you are reaching out to.
• Enrolment — the act (and record) of putting one prospect into one sequence.
• Suppression list — the "never email" list checked before every send.
• Mailbox warmup — starting a new mailbox at low volume and increasing it gradually to build a good sending reputation.
• Daily cap — the maximum emails one mailbox may send per day.
• Send window — the hours and weekdays a sequence is allowed to send.
• Sending domain — the domain your outbound email is sent from, proved legitimate by DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX).
• Deliverability — the likelihood your email lands in the inbox rather than spam.
• Reply detection — matching an incoming reply to the exact outbound email (and prospect) that prompted it.
• Engagement event — a single recorded fact (sent, opened, clicked, replied, bounced…) that all analytics are built from.
• Bounce — an email that could not be delivered; hard bounces suppress the address automatically.
• Workspace — the single shared container for all your team's data in one install.

13. Where to go next

Read this…	…when you want
getting-started.md	the operator's step-by-step first-run walkthrough
installation-guide.md	to install the software itself
production-initialization.md	to initialise (or reset) a production database safely
user-guide-layman.md	a gentle tour of everyday use
user-guide-detailed.md	the full capability-by-capability manual
integration-guide.md	webhooks and connecting other systems
technical-documentation.md	how it works under the hood
api-reference.md	the HTTP API surface
login-troubleshooting.md	sign-in problems (loops, 401s)
useful-commands.md	the operator's command cheatsheet
testing.md	the automated test inventory

Questions, ideas, or need a hand customising it? wbsp.ai.