The sequence engine: enrollment, caps, and exits

4 min read · Updated Jul 28, 2026

A sequence is an ordered set of steps — email, delay, task, or condition — that walks a contact through outreach automatically. "AI sequences and campaigns" covers how the AI drafts the content; this article covers the mechanics underneath: who can build one, how contacts get in, how sends are paced, and how a contact gets out.

Sales → Sequences. Each row shows who's currently walking it and when it last sent. A reply exits the contact automatically.

Manual vs. AI-built, and who can build one

Every sequence has typed steps under the hood. You can build one from scratch in the sequence builder, or click "Build with AI": describe the goal in plain words and review a full draft — emails, waits, and follow-ups — before anything is saved. Either way, nothing sends until you approve it.

Sales leadership can create, edit, or delete any sequence in the tenant. Anyone with CRM access can build their own — you can only create a sequence under your own name, and you can only edit or delete sequences you created (leadership can touch everything).

Auto-enrollment triggers

Beyond manually enrolling a contact or an audience, a sequence can auto-enroll on a trigger you arm once and forget:

＋A lead is routed — optionally scoped to one named intake form, or any form.
＋A deal enters a specific pipeline stage — enrolls the company's primary contact and links the enrollment to that deal.
＋A tag is applied to a contact — fires the moment that exact tag lands, whether applied by hand or by an import.

Triggered enrollments are silent — no separate notification type fires for them; you'll see the activity on the contact's timeline and in the sequence's own report. Emails from a triggered enrollment send from the mailbox of whoever set up the trigger, exactly like a manual enrollment sends from whoever clicked enroll.

Dedupe and suppression

Before anyone is enrolled — manually, by audience, by CSV list, or by trigger — Current checks three things: is this contact already actively enrolled in this sequence (skipped, no duplicate), does this contact have no email on file (skipped), and has this contact's email been suppressed — bounced or unsubscribed (skipped). A contact who unsubscribes from any sequence is never re-enrolled in that sequence again.

Pacing: business days and the daily cap

Guardrail	Behavior
Business-day scheduling	On by default per sequence — delays skip weekends and your tenant's holiday calendar (the same calendar the project scheduler uses).
Daily send cap	250 sequence emails per mailbox per calendar day. Send #251 isn't an error — it queues to the next business morning.

Note

This cap comes off your Microsoft 365, not Current's mail service

Sequence emails send through each account executive's own Microsoft 365 mailbox — not Current's shared notifications address (that's only for sign-in codes, invites, and digests). So the 250-a-day limit is a per-person Microsoft 365 limit Current enforces to protect your sender reputation. Enroll 1,000 people in one click and Current paces them: about 250 go out the first business day, the next 250 the day after, and so on, with the rest waiting safely in the queue. The Sequences page shows how many are waiting for the next window, and the sequence report repeats the same numbers under "Sending & safety."

Tip

Sending a very large list? Use a campaign, not a sequence

Sequences are for personal, paced outreach from your own mailbox. For a true one-to-many blast — 500 contacts or more — a Campaign is the better tool: it's purpose-built for bulk sending with unsubscribe handling. At sequence volume from a personal mailbox, a list full of bad addresses, bounces, or spam complaints can drag down your domain's sender reputation, so Current warns you before a 500+ enrollment and points you at campaigns. Whichever you use, verify (Enrich) a big list first to strip bad addresses before you send.

Exit conditions

An enrollment exits automatically — never silently stalls — on any of these:

＋A reply is detected from the contact.
＋The contact's email gets suppressed (unsubscribe or hard bounce).
＋The linked deal is won.
＋The linked deal is lost.
＋The contact finishes every step in the sequence (completed).

A condition step can also branch on "no reply after N days" — exit the sequence or continue past it, your choice per step.

Note

"Completed" vs "Waiting for steps"

"Completed" in the report means a contact walked every step of a built sequence — a real finish. It does NOT mean "enrolled but nothing happened." If you enroll people into a sequence that has no email steps yet, they aren't marked completed — they simply wait, and the report shows them as "Waiting for steps." Add at least one email step (and switch the sequence on) and the first send goes out on the next cycle; nobody is ever quietly marked done before an email is sent.

Reuse a sequence: duplicate and templates

Open the menu on any sequence row and you can copy it without touching the original.

＋Duplicate — makes a new sequence called "Copy of «name»" with every step copied across in order, config and all.
＋Save as template — files a copy under the Templates tab on the Sequences page. The sequence you saved from keeps running exactly as it was.
＋Use template — creates a brand-new sequence from a saved one, named however you like.
＋New sequence offers "Start from a template" whenever your workspace has one, next to Build with AI and Build manually.

Every copy is created paused, so nothing sends until you switch it on deliberately. The steps come across; the people do not. Enrollments, send history, and auto-enroll triggers are never copied — a copy that inherited a trigger would quietly start enrolling everyone the original was set up to catch.

Note

A template never enrols anyone

Templates live in their own tab and sit outside the library. They are paused, hold no enrollments, and carry no triggers, so the engine can never reach one. Use a template to create a sequence, then set up enrollment on the sequence you created. Deleting a template only removes the saved starting point — sequences already built from it keep running.

Reporting and deleting a sequence

Open a sequence's report for a full-screen view of its funnel — sends, opens, replies, and where every enrolled contact currently sits — with replies called out as the headline metric.

Heads up

Deleting a sequence with people still enrolled

Deleting a sequence deletes its steps, its triggers, and every enrollment — active and historical — along with their run logs. An active enrollment is a pending send in the executor's queue, so deleting the sequence cancels every queued email for everyone still walking it. This does not touch the contacts or companies themselves. There's no undo, so pause a sequence first if you just want to stop new sends without losing its history.

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