A prospect replied but the sequence continued

Normally a reply stops a person's remaining follow-ups in that campaign. If someone got a follow-up after replying, one of the causes below is almost always the reason. Start by opening the person in the campaign's Overview → Recipients, and looking for their reply in Outreach → Inbox.

1. A remaining follow-up is meant for repliers

If a follow-up still ahead uses the trigger If replied or No matter what, a reply doesn't stop the sequence, because that step is supposed to reach people who replied. No matter what sends whether or not they replied.

Fix: check the triggers in the campaign's Emails tab. A launched campaign can't be edited, so if the trigger was a mistake, block the person if needed (see 5 below) and use If no reply in future campaigns.

2. Distro sorted the reply as automatic

Out-of-office messages, auto-responders and spam-challenge messages don't count as replies. If a real person's answer looked automatic (for example it came with auto-reply headers or out-of-office wording), Distro may have sorted it as Out of office or Automatic reply.

Fix: open the conversation in the Inbox and use Sort as… to choose Human reply, Interested, Not interested or Neutral. Remaining If no reply follow-ups are then skipped for that person.

3. Distro never saw the reply

Distro reads replies from the campaign's connected sender mailbox, and only in the conversation started by your campaign email. A reply is missed when:

• It went to a different mailbox. If you set Reply to in the campaign to an address in another mailbox, replies land there and Distro can't see them. See Replies are going to the wrong mailbox.
• The prospect started a new email instead of replying to yours.
• The sender mailbox was disconnected, so new mail couldn't be read in time. See A reply is not appearing in Distro.

Fix: if the reply isn't in the Inbox, sort out the mailbox first. Then stop the person manually (see 5 below).

4. The reply and the follow-up crossed

Distro re-checks for a reply right before each follow-up is sent. But if the reply arrived at almost the same moment the follow-up was being handed to Google, the follow-up can still go out. Check the times of the reply and the follow-up in the Inbox conversation.

5. They're in more than one campaign

A reply stops the person in the campaign they replied to. If they're also in another campaign, that one continues.

Fix: to make sure someone receives nothing else from any campaign, go to People → Unsubscribed and click Block address. Distro checks this list before every email. Only do this if they shouldn't be emailed again; to keep talking to them, reply from the Inbox.

In an Email + LinkedIn campaign

A reply on either channel stops the whole flow for that person, so a LinkedIn reply also stops the remaining emails. Before each email, Distro checks LinkedIn for a reply. To see what happened, open the campaign's View results and click the person: their timeline shows each step and, if the flow stopped, why (for example "Stopped: They replied on LinkedIn"). See LinkedIn replies and stop on reply.

Not the cause

• Out-of-office replies are meant to let follow-ups continue. That isn't a fault.
• Unsubscribe requests and hard bounces always stop every campaign. If someone who asked to be removed kept receiving emails, check whether their reply reached the Inbox (cause 3) and block their address.

For the full rules, see How stop-on-reply works.