# A reply rate that means something · Sales as Code [← All posts](https://salesascode.com/blog) // the blog # A reply rate that means something By Sales as Code · 2026-09-04 product outbound Ask an outbound tool what your reply rate is and you will get a number. Ask what is in the number and things get quieter. Three different things arrive in a thread after you send to it. A person writes back. A mail server writes back to say they are away until the fourteenth. Or a mail server writes back to say the address does not exist. Only one of those is a reply. Rolling all three into one figure produces a number that goes up when your list gets worse, which is the opposite of what a metric is for. ## Three verdicts The Dispatch Queue records one of three verdicts on every message that goes out, and keeps them apart. - Replied. Somebody wrote back. - Auto-reply. A machine wrote back while they were away. - Bounced. The address is dead. The classifier tests for a bounce before it tests for an out-of-office, and the order matters more than it looks. A delivery failure usually quotes the original subject back at you, so a message whose subject was "Automatic reply: quick question" can match both patterns. Read it as an auto-reply and you have quietly hidden a dead address, which is the one of the three you most need to know about. ## How it is read Mail sent through a cold-send vendor gets its replies pushed back by webhook. Mail sent from your own mailbox has nobody to push it, so the platform sweeps instead: once an hour, for every message with no verdict yet, it reads the thread it landed in and finds the first message that arrived after your send from somebody other than you. It reads the sender, the subject, the date and the automatic-reply headers, plus the one-line preview the mail provider already returns. It does not fetch the body. There is nothing in a message body that changes any of the three answers above, so there is no reason to hold a copy of it. If your mailbox is disconnected, the sweep stops and the rows keep the state they had. Not being able to look is not the same as nobody writing back, and a tool that conflates those two is telling you your campaign failed when what actually failed was its own connection. ## What it is for A reply goes onto the same event bus as a reply arriving through a connected CRM, so the rest of the platform reacts to it identically whichever way it came in. And the ledger stops being a list of things you sent. It becomes a list of conversations you started, which is the number anybody actually wanted. [Run it on your company → free audit](https://salesascode.com/audit?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=post) --- More for agents: [llms.txt](https://salesascode.com/llms.txt), [full reference](https://salesascode.com/llms-full.txt), [OpenAPI](https://salesascode.com/openapi.json), [sitemap](https://salesascode.com/sitemap.xml).