# Classifying cold email replies

> How to sort cold email replies into interested, meeting, pricing, question, not now, not interested, wrong person and unsubscribe, and what to do when unsure.

Source: https://docs.ayinbox.com/learn/reply-classification/

Reply classification sorts each human reply by what the person wants, so warm replies get answered first and opt-outs are honoured. AY Inbox's [inbox tagging](/guides/inbox-tagging/) labels a person's reply as Interested, Meeting, Pricing, Question, Update, Not now, Not interested, Wrong person, Unsubscribe or Legal threat. It leaves a reply unlabelled rather than guess.

A **reply intent** is what a reply asks of you: a call, a price, an answer, more time, or to be left alone. Reading it correctly decides who you answer first, which sequences stop, and which addresses are never mailed again. Getting it wrong in either direction costs something: a missed yes is lost revenue, and a missed "remove me" is a complaint.

First filter out what is not a person [#first-filter-out-what-is-not-a-person]

Most of what lands after a campaign send is not a reply at all. Before any intent is read, each message gets one **kind**:

| Kind                      | Label         | Examples                                               |
| ------------------------- | ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ |
| Hard or soft bounce       | Bounced       | Address does not exist, mailbox full                   |
| Out-of-office             | Out of office | Vacation and away messages                             |
| Automated acknowledgement | Auto-reply    | Ticket receipts, "we got your message"                 |
| Notification              | Notification  | Sign-in codes, receipts, newsletters, platform notices |
| Cold inbound              | Sales pitch   | Someone pitching you, not answering your campaign      |
| Internal                  | (none)        | Your own team, or mail forwarded internally            |
| Human reply               | (none)        | A real person responding to your outreach              |

Common senders and headers (no-reply addresses, bulk mail, out-of-office subjects, delivery failures) are decided offline, with no model call. Everything else is judged by the model. Mail no person wrote moves to the **Automated** view, except a notification that needs your action, which stays in the inbox labelled **Action required**.

Intent is read only when the kind is a human reply: an intent on a bounce would answer a question nobody asked. Out-of-office replies have their own handling, covered in [out-of-office replies](/learn/out-of-office-replies/).

The reply intents [#the-reply-intents]

| Label          | Intent                             | Means                                                                     |
| -------------- | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Interested     | `agreed`                           | Agrees to the call, the partnership or the next step                      |
| Meeting        | `scheduling`                       | Proposes, confirms or changes a specific time to meet, or asks for a call |
| Pricing        | `wants_pricing`                    | Asks about price, terms or commercials                                    |
| Question       | `wants_info`                       | Open, but asking questions before deciding                                |
| Update         | `in_progress`, `question_answered` | News on something already agreed, or the answer to something you asked    |
| Not now        | `not_now`                          | Open in principle, but the timing is wrong                                |
| Not interested | `not_interested`                   | Declines, without demanding removal                                       |
| Wrong person   | `wrong_person`                     | Not the right contact, or names someone else                              |
| Unsubscribe    | `opt_out`                          | Asks to stop, complains or threatens                                      |
| Legal threat   | (a signal)                         | Threatens legal action or names a regulator                               |

There is also `unclear`, for a reply whose intent genuinely cannot be read. It gets no intent label, because a wrong label is worse than none: the model is never forced to pick a bucket just to answer. The `in_progress`, `scheduling` and `question_answered` intents exist because a real inbox is mostly ongoing conversations, not first answers to cold mail.

Opt-outs do not wait for tagging. A reply that says "remove me" in so many words is suppressed by a phrase list read on every reply, whether or not tagging is on, unless the workspace turned off **Honour replies that ask to stop**; see [handling opt-out replies](/learn/handling-opt-out-replies/).

What counts as positive [#what-counts-as-positive]

For deciding who to answer first, the actionable set is **Interested**, **Meeting**, **Pricing** and **Question**: each is a person asking you for something. The unibox's **Hot leads** view lists Interested, Meeting and Pricing; **Declined** lists Not interested, Wrong person and Unsubscribe.

Campaign reporting uses a coarser reading with three outcomes for a human reply: positive, negative or neutral. With tagging on, Interested, Meeting, Pricing, Question and Update read as positive, Not interested and Wrong person as negative, and Not now and unclear replies as neutral. Without tagging, offline phrase lists decide the clear cases and an optional model call the rest.

So, in AY Inbox, the **positive reply rate** is positive replies divided by emails sent, the same denominator as the reply rate. From the same number of sends, a campaign with 100 replies and 5 positive does worse than one with 60 replies and 20 positive. Negative replies, requests to stop, unclassified replies, out-of-office notices and autoresponders never count as positive. See [analytics](/guides/analytics/).

Confidence and Needs review [#confidence-and-needs-review]

Every verdict carries a confidence between 0 and 1, and nothing acts on a low one:

1. If the kind is below 0.70, the thread is labelled **Needs review**, gets no other label and stays in the inbox.
2. If the kind is confident but the intent is below 0.70, the kind and relevance stay, the intent label is left off, and **Needs review** is added.
3. A verdict marked Needs review never holds, stops, suppresses or answers anything.

The floor is not caution for its own sake. A low-confidence answer is not reproducible: the same ambiguous message, classified three times, returned a different winning label each time while confidence stayed near 0.2. A person reading it once is cheaper than an action taken on a coin toss.

Where the verdict goes [#where-the-verdict-goes]

One stored verdict feeds several features, so a reply is judged once:

* **The inbox.** Labels, a 0 to 100 relevance score and the premade views in the [unibox](/guides/unibox/).
* **Campaign actions.** Switches under **Settings > Sending > Classified replies** hold a contact who says Not now (30 days by default), stop one who declines, and open a task when someone asks for a call; those three are on by default. A fourth, off by default, suppresses a sender asking for removal at 0.80 or above. Only a confident human reply acts.
* **Auto-reply.** [Auto-reply](/guides/auto-reply/) answers only a confident human reply whose intent the campaign allows, at confidence of at least 0.80. See [safe automatic replies](/learn/safe-automatic-replies/).
* **Booking.** A Meeting intent at 0.70 or above, or a clear request for a call, lets [calendar booking](/guides/booking/) offer open times.
* **Webhooks and automations.** The `campaign.reply_received` event carries the verdict as `ai_labels`, `ai_intent`, `ai_intent_confidence`, `ai_kind`, `ai_relevance` and `ai_needs_review`. `ai_intent` and `ai_kind` are empty strings when tagging was not confident, and the keys are absent when tagging never judged the message. To be told about every interested lead, see [the positive reply webhook recipe](/api/recipes/positive-reply-webhook/).

Languages [#languages]

Tagging reads English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch out of the box. Add other languages under **Settings > Sending > Tagging languages and questions**, from a list of 44. Adding one names it to the classifier as a hint and adds that language's quoted-history markers and out-of-office subjects to the offline reading, so the classifier reads what the person wrote rather than your own message quoted under it. Leave off languages nobody writes to you in: each one adds patterns that could misread someone's mail.

## Frequently asked questions

### What counts as a positive reply in cold email?

A reply from a person who wants to move forward or learn more, such as agreeing to a call, proposing a time, asking about price or asking questions before deciding. Out-of-office notices, auto-replies, declines and requests to stop never count as positive.

### How is positive reply rate calculated?

In AY Inbox, the positive rate divides the replies the classifier judged positive by the emails sent, the same denominator as the reply rate. That lets two campaigns compare on opportunities created rather than on raw replies.

### What is the difference between "not now" and "not interested"?

"Not now" is open in principle but says the timing is wrong, so it is worth a later follow-up. "Not interested" declines without asking for removal, so the sequence should stop but the contact is not suppressed.

### Can replies be classified automatically in languages other than English?

Yes. AY Inbox's inbox tagging reads English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch out of the box, and a workspace can add others from a list of 44 languages so quoted history and out-of-office replies are recognised in them too.