The sending half of OpenOutreach. OpenOutreach finds and qualifies B2B leads and prints them; it does not send email. This is what sends them.
The boundary between the two is a pipe, and nothing else crosses it:
openoutreach find 50 --json | outsendfind writes qualified leads as JSON Lines on stdout. outsend reads them, stores them in its own
database, and exits — it transmits nothing at that moment. Delivery, pacing and whatever step
structure it grows are its own business, on its own clock.
The pipe is one-way by design. Every consumer sees the same bytes, so a file dropped into Instantly or Smartlead gets exactly what this receiver gets, and "our own sender has no privileged path" is held by construction rather than by discipline.
Every message this sends ends with one added line, Sent with OpenOutreach, appended after your
signature and opt-out (cold_outreach/emails/sender.py). It is always on — there is no setting to
remove it. It carries no link, no pixel, and no per-install identifier; nothing reports back whether a
send happened or whether the line survived. This is how the project sustains itself with no
subscription fee, no promo campaign, and no markup on anything you buy through it.
Everything else about a send — the address you write from, what you write, and your compliance with anti-spam law (CAN-SPAM, GDPR/ePrivacy, CASL, and others) — is yours: this tool provides the mechanism, not legal cover.
outsend is a command and the store is its own. Install it, pipe leads in, and they land as rows;
a second, separate invocation is what mails them:
pip install -e .
outsend init --campaign devtools # once: what you sell, who you are, a box
openoutreach find 50 --json | outsend --campaign devtools # store
outsend send --campaign devtools # one pass: read, answer, follow up, open
outsend send 5 --campaign devtools # or: keep going until 5 are open
outsend send all --campaign devtools # or: until nobody is left to emailThe two invocations are separate on purpose: a pipe's right-hand side must not block on the network
while a producer is still writing, and the cadences differ — leads arrive when find runs, mail moves
on the mailbox's clock. So the cron line is two entries, not one command doing both.
It reads JSON Lines on stdin, upserts on (lead_id, campaign), checks every address against the
suppression list at the door, skips and counts a malformed line, prints the campaign it resolved and
the counts to stderr, and exits 0 when every line became a row. Its database is
~/.openoutsend/data/db.sqlite3 (OUTSEND_HOME / OUTSEND_DB override it) and it migrates itself on
first run, so a fresh install is an ingest that works rather than a traceback.
outsend send is one pass: it reads the mail, answers every thread the lead has replied in, writes
again to the ones who went quiet, opens as many first emails as the guards allow right now, and
exits. Reading first is what makes the rest honest — an opt-out that arrived overnight suppresses the
person before anything is written to them. That is the form a timer wants, and it is what the cron
line fires.
outsend send 5 is a goal, and it waits. Five means five new conversations, and the run keeps
passing until they are open — sleeping out the spacing clock between sends, the daily ceiling, and the
sending window, including overnight and across a weekend if that is what the guards say. Nothing
polls: the pool is asked when it could next open one (Mailbox.objects.next_first_email_at) and the
run sleeps until then, so the external cycler that used to check whether now was a good time has
nothing left to do. The wait is spent working — every five minutes it wakes for a full pass, so
replies are still answered on a mailbox's cadence while the openers are on hold. Only openers count
toward the goal; a busy inbox cannot satisfy it. It stops short, and says so, when the lead pool is
drained (waiting cannot refill it — ingest is a separate invocation), when no mailbox is connected, or
when two passes in a row fail a send and open nothing, which is a receiver's answer rather than a
clock. Ctrl-C hands back the conversations already opened.
outsend send all makes the pool itself the goal — everybody who has an address gets one, and the
run ends when nobody is left. It is the same run with one verdict inverted: the drained pool that
fails send 5 at three of five is exactly what all asked for, so it exits 0 saying how many went.
Prefer it to typing a count you had to look up, since that number is stale by the time you type it.
The other endings stay failures — no mailbox, and a receiver refusing twice in a row.
So find N emails --json | outsend && outsend send N needs no cron entry at all: the second command
returns when the conversations are open, whether that takes four minutes or spans a weekend. A timer
firing a bare outsend send remains the other way to run it, and the two do not conflict — the pass is
the same either way, and nothing here is state a lost process would strand.
A lead who never answers gets two more emails, then the pursuit ends — after three working days,
then five, and the deal closes as unresponsive. A reply at any point ends the sequence and the
conversation takes over. Follow-ups are cold volume and are treated as such: they share one daily
cap, one spacing clock and one sending window with the openers, rather than claiming ahead of them out
of a budget of their own. A reply obeys none of the three, because answering someone who wrote to you
is not cold volume and holding the answer until Monday is worse than sending it at 21:00.
outsend init collects what a first run needs — what the campaign sells and to whom, the name
that signs the mail, and a mailbox to send it from — and it runs implicitly on the first send, so a
setup step is never something a timer discovers. The environment first, prompts second and only on a
terminal; headless, whatever is still missing is one error naming every variable that would have
answered it. The mailbox is stored only once its credentials pass an SMTP login, because the provider
has no health API and that login is the only gate there is.
Releases are every green push to main (.github/workflows/deploy.yml): tests, then a build and a
PyPI upload over trusted publishing, with the version derived from the commit count rather than
committed — the finder's rule, for the reason it went there, since a release nobody has to remember
cannot drift. No token is stored anywhere; the publisher is registered against the workflow filename
and the pypi environment, so neither may be renamed.
Still open: arming that (a PyPI pending publisher and the pypi environment are two browser steps),
and then pip install openoutreach[send], which can only be declared once this distribution is on
PyPI.
pytestpytest-django against a throwaway state dir (conftest.py redirects OUTSEND_HOME before Django
loads, so a test run never touches ~/.openoutsend). Nothing is skipped or ignored: the files that
came across with the transport now assert against this side's own models.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
cold_outreach/leads/ |
what comes through the pipe — the models, ingest, suppression, the facts extraction |
cold_outreach/emails/ |
the transport — SMTP, IMAP sync, the mail pass, threads, delivery policy, warmth |
cold_outreach/core/ |
the outreach agent, its templates, the sending window, and the stored site configuration |
cold_outreach/docs/ |
how the agent and its templating work |
cold_outreach/settings.py |
this repo's own Django settings and the state dir |
cold_outreach/send_pass.py |
one pass — read, answer, open — and the line saying what held it |
cold_outreach/send_job.py |
send N — passes until the goal is open, waiting out the send clocks |
cold_outreach/first_run.py |
what init collects — the campaign's fields, the model, the operator, the mailbox |
cold_outreach/__main__.py |
the outsend console script |
roadmap/ |
open work, mostly inherited from OpenOutreach along with the code it describes |
The environment is the operator seam — the only way in a timer has:
OUTSEND_OPERATOR_COUNTRY |
ISO 3166 alpha-2; resolves the local clock the sending window is measured in |
OUTSEND_AI_MODEL |
a pydantic-ai provider:model id, e.g. anthropic:claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 |
OUTSEND_LLM_API_KEY / OUTSEND_LLM_API_BASE |
credentials for it; outsend init also asks for these on a terminal |
OUTSEND_PRODUCT_DOCS / OUTSEND_CAMPAIGN_TARGET / OUTSEND_BOOKING_LINK |
what a campaign writes from; outsend init also asks for these on a terminal |
OUTSEND_OPERATOR_NAME / OUTSEND_OPERATOR_EMAIL |
who signs the mail, and the address every send is blind-copied to (blank for none) |
OUTSEND_MAILBOX_ADDRESS / OUTSEND_MAILBOX_PASSWORD |
the box to send from, and its app password — a Google box rejects the login password |
OUTSEND_SMTP_HOST / OUTSEND_SMTP_PORT / OUTSEND_IMAP_HOST / OUTSEND_IMAP_PORT |
only for a box that is not on Google Workspace; those four default to Gmail's and are never prompted for |
OUTSEND_SIGNATURE |
the sign-off appended to every send from that box; empty declines one for good |
OUTSEND_HOME / OUTSEND_DB |
where the store lives |
Most of these are read once and then stored. The campaign's fields, the model and its
key, the operator and the mailbox are collected by outsend init — which outsend send
runs implicitly before any mail moves — and land in the store, where the operator can edit
them. A variable seeds an empty field and never overwrites a filled one, so a stale unit
file cannot silently revert an answer changed in the store. Two of them are checked before
they are kept: the mailbox by its SMTP login, the model by one ping. OUTSEND_HOME,
OUTSEND_DB and OUTSEND_OPERATOR_COUNTRY are the ones that stay settings — they
configure the process, not the outreach.
The store therefore holds credentials — the mailbox's app password and the LLM key.
~/.openoutsend/data/db.sqlite3 is a file to keep: back it up, and do not copy it around.
The full design — what crosses, the record's field set, exit-code meaning, and why ingest is
idempotent — lives in
roadmap/p1-e2-find-send-boundary-contract.md
in the openoutreach-docs repo. The parts this side owes:
- Ingest is idempotent, keyed on
(lead_id, campaign), so the pipe is allowed to be lossy and recovery is running it again. - Suppression is checked at the door and is terminal — the legal duty came here with
emails/, and a re-ingest must never resurrect somebody who opted out. An address that changed is re-checked, because ingest is lead-keyed while suppression is address-keyed. - Conflicts resolve latest-wins, field by field: a re-ingest is a correction, not a duplicate.
- A malformed line is skipped and counted, named on stderr, with a non-zero exit —
findspent real money on the rows behind it, so aborting the batch throws away paid work. - A blank
emailis stored, not rejected. An exportable row is not a mailable one; the address is an enrichment that a later run fills in for free.
MIT — see LICENSE.