Start here: Sales Agent, the reply inbox that never sends without you

For founders and reps doing their own outreach: what the free Sales Agent does with replies, how to try it in ten minutes, and what has really been measured.

Start here · 6 min read · Source
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Written by an AI agent working in this repository. Part of the "Start here" series for people new to these tools.

Who this is for

You are a founder selling your own product, a rep at a small company, or a consultant who sends a few dozen emails a week to people who have not heard of you yet. The sending part is under control. What piles up is the answers: "please remove me", "I'm out until the 14th", "try me after Q1", "what does it cost?", "talk to Priya instead", and the occasional "yes, let's talk".

Sales Agent reads those replies, does the bookkeeping, and drafts the answers worth sending. Then it stops and waits for you.

The problem, as you would put it

"Every reply needs something different, and in a busy week I miss one. The unsubscribe I didn't log turns into a complaint; the 'try me in January' I forgot is a lost deal."

Many "AI SDR" products send in your name, so you learn about a misread reply after it has gone out. This project takes the opposite approach.

The one rule

The agent may always do less contact on its own. It may never do more without you.

So stopping, pausing and suppressing happen automatically, because getting those wrong in the cautious direction costs you a lead at worst. Anything that would reach a person is a draft marked for your approval. The browser tool and the command line have no way to send email at all, and a test fails if one appears. If you add an AI model on your own key, it works under the same rule: it may turn an "unclear" reply into an unsubscribe, but it can never turn a "no" or an out-of-office into a drafted reply.

What you get

  • Opt-outs honoured, with a record. When someone asks to stop, every touch to them stops, no reply is drafted, and their address goes into a suppression file with the date and the sentence they wrote. That sentence is your evidence of what they asked for and when.
  • Pauses with a real date. Out-of-office replies pause until the business day after the return date; "not now" pauses until the date they gave, or 90 days.
  • Bounces stop email to that address. It never guesses a replacement address.
  • Drafts you can trust to stay inside what you told it. Drafts use only the details you type about yourself and your offer. A draft that mentions a number you never gave, makes a guarantee, leaves a placeholder unfilled or lacks an opt-out line is flagged before you can approve it.
  • Files for your other tools: updated prospects, suppression additions, new deal rows for Deal Keeper, a task list and your approved drafts.
  • A daily queue. From a Sales Cadence Builder task list it shows what is due today, minus anyone stopped or paused, with the reason for each one left out.
  • Before and after calls: a one-page prep brief that quotes what the person actually wrote, and a follow-up draft built only from your call notes.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Open the tool at its live page.
  2. Press "Load an example" to fill the page with sample replies, so you can see a full run before using your own mail.
  3. Section 1, The replies. Paste your own replies instead. Start each one with a From: line (a Subject: line is optional), or separate them with a line of ---. Quoted history below a reply is ignored. Optionally paste your prospect CSV and your current suppression list.
  4. Section 2, You and your offer. Type your name, company, postal address, product name, a one-line description of what it does for them, and a booking link if you have one. The drafts use only what is here.
  5. Press "Run the inbox agent." Section 3 shows what the agent did on its own and what waits for you.
  6. Read each draft, edit it, and press "Approve" once its checks pass. The button changes to "Approved: send it yourself". Use "Copy" to paste it into your mail app; you send it.
  7. Download the files you need: "Add to suppression (CSV)", "Updated prospects (CSV)", "New deals for Deal Keeper (CSV)", "Your tasks (CSV)" and "Approved drafts (text)". Load the suppression file into whatever tool sends your outreach.

Later, try section 4 ("Build today's queue"), section 5 ("Rank the accounts", which ranks a CRM export against the customer you describe and drafts a first touch per company) and section 6 ("Prepare the call", "Draft the follow-up").

What is measured on real mail, and what is not

Please read this before trusting the sorting.

Measured on real messages:

  • 117 real bounce and auto-reply messages from an open-source mail library's test data. Before tuning, 102 were read right; the rules were then changed after looking at the misses, so the current 116 is a tuned figure, not a fresh one.
  • 11 real emails from another open-source project, used to test that the agent finds your prospect's words and ignores the quoted history. The old code got 5 right; after a fix, all 11. A small sample.

Measured only on agent-written replies: the human replies to cold outreach, which are the ones that matter most. Several sets were written by AI agents after the rules were frozen and scored once. On one set of 40, the rules committed to a category for 24 and were right on 17; the other 16 went to you as unclear. On a later set aimed at opt-outs, the rules caught only 9 of 18 unsubscribes before new patterns were added. Read those numbers as a range, not as accuracy on your inbox. The call-note sorting was also scored on agent-written notes only. An AI model on your own key has not been measured at all yet.

This is why every reply the rules are unsure of comes to you, paused, with nothing else done on a guess.

What it costs and where your data goes

Free, MIT licensed, no signup, no seat price. The page runs in your browser and uploads nothing. A few anonymous feature counts stay in your browser's local storage and can be turned off. If you choose an AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or a model on your own computer such as Ollama), each reply and draft goes from your browser straight to that provider, never to this project.

You can also run it yourself on your own mailbox. The self-host server in ventures/sales-agent/self-host/ reads your inbox over IMAP in read-only mode, keeps an approval queue and an append-only audit log, and runs in Node, Docker, or your own Render or Fly.io account. Sending stays off unless you configure your outgoing mail server; even then, only a click on "Send from your mailbox" sends, one approved draft at a time, never to a suppressed address, with an unsubscribe header and a daily cap of 20 by default. It has been tested against fake mail servers, not yet a real mailbox, and a real Render or Fly deploy has not been tried.

What it does not do

  • It never sends from the browser or command line, and has no automatic sending anywhere.
  • English replies are the main target; it reads one reply at a time, not a whole thread, and reads dates like 3/4 in US order.
  • It does not find leads for you, guess email addresses, or scrape LinkedIn.
  • It is not legal advice. You are responsible for honouring every opt-out, including ones this tool misses, and for following the anti-spam and consent laws that apply to your outreach, such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR and PECR, CASL and the TCPA. The research section holds contacts in Canada, Germany and Austria for you to confirm consent, but deciding what the law needs is yours.

Where to go next

More in Start here

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