Reply and bounce handling

How OmniLead detects replies, ignores out-of-office messages, stops sequences, and turns bounces into suppressions automatically.

3 min readLast updated Sep 28, 2026

Once a sequence is running, OmniLead watches your connected mailboxes for responses and acts on them straight away, so nobody gets a follow-up after they've replied, unsubscribed or bounced.

Replies

How replies are detected

OmniLead checks each mailbox over IMAP every few minutes. A message counts as a reply when:

It's in a thread OmniLead started, matched by the In-Reply-To and References headers, or
It comes from the address of a lead enrolled in a sequence from that mailbox

What happens when someone replies

The sequence stops for that lead
No more steps are sent to them from any sequence in that mailbox's workspace.
The lead moves to Replied
In every pipeline where the sequence is set to update stages, the lead moves to Replied or your equivalent stage.
The reply lands in the inbox
It appears in the unified inbox as unread, and the lead's owner is notified.

If you want to keep a lead in the sequence after a reply, for example an "I'm the wrong person, try Sam" reply, open the enrollment and click Resume.

Out-of-office replies

Automatic replies are recognized by their headers (such as Auto-Submitted and X-Autoreply) and common wording. They don't stop the sequence and don't count as replies in your metrics.

If an out-of-office message includes a return date, OmniLead shows it on the lead so you can decide whether to pause them. It doesn't reschedule automatically.

Unsubscribe replies

A reply asking to stop, such as "unsubscribe", "remove me" or "please stop emailing", is treated as an unsubscribe: the address is added to your suppression list at once and every enrollment for it ends. You'll see it flagged in the inbox so you can confirm.

Bounces

A bounce is a message returned as undeliverable. OmniLead reads the bounce report that arrives in your mailbox and classifies it.

Type	Examples	What OmniLead does
Hard bounce	Mailbox doesn't exist, domain doesn't exist	Marks the address Invalid, adds it to suppression, ends every enrollment
Soft bounce	Mailbox full, server busy, message too large	Retries later; after repeated soft bounces the address is treated as a hard bounce
Block	Rejected as spam, policy rejection	Pauses sends from that mailbox to that domain and flags the mailbox for review

Bounce reports are parsed from the standard delivery status format, including the status code (for example 5.1.1 for an unknown user) and the diagnostic text, which you can see on the lead's activity timeline.

Bounce rate and auto-pause

Each sequence tracks its bounce rate: hard bounces divided by emails sent. If it reaches 5%, the sequence pauses automatically to protect your domain. See Auto-pause for what to do next.

Suppression

Suppressed addresses never receive email from your workspace, from any sequence or mailbox, including one-off replies from the inbox if they unsubscribed. Addresses are suppressed when:

They unsubscribe, by link, by their email app's unsubscribe button, or by reply
They hard-bounce
They're removed through the public opt-out portal (applies to every workspace)
You add them yourself in Settings → Compliance

Suppression is checked at the moment each email is sent, not just at enrollment, so it takes effect immediately.

Where to see what happened

Every reply, auto-reply, unsubscribe and bounce appears on the lead's Activity timeline, with the original message available. The sequence's Activity tab lists the same events across all its leads.