Front Sequences Explained (Outbound Email Automation)

What a Front sequence is

A sequence is automated, staged outbound email to a list of recipients. Per Front's Understanding sequences guide, a sequence lets you "automate outreach and communications to a group of people using a list of email addresses." You draft the emails once, attach a recipient list, and Front handles the sending and the timed follow-ups.

Each sequence is made of stages — between 1 and 10, labelled A through J. Stage A is the first email that goes out; every subsequent stage is sent as a reply on the same thread, which is exactly what you want for a follow-up ("Just bumping this up…"). You set a date and time for each stage, so the cadence is yours: Stage A now, Stage B in three days, Stage C a week later.

The two most common uses are the obvious ones. Sales and outreach teams use sequences for cold or warm prospecting — an intro, a follow-up, a breakup email. Support and ops teams use them for proactive announcements, renewal nudges, onboarding drip emails, or checking in on a cohort of customers. Anywhere you want to send roughly the same thing to many people with automatic follow-up, a sequence fits.

Building one: the New sequence dialog

You start from Sequences in the Front navigation, choose whether the sequence is Personal or Workspace visibility, then click Create sequence. That opens the New sequence dialog, which is the screenshot below and the entry point to everything that follows. Per Front's How to create a new sequence walkthrough, this first dialog captures:

• Name — an internal label for the sequence (recipients never see it).
• From — the email channel the sequence sends from. This is the field that gates everything (more on that in the limits section).
• Cc / Bcc — optional, one address each, copied on every sequence email.
• Sender name — how recipients see the sender's identity.

Once the dialog is confirmed, Front opens the multi-step editor. There you Add stage for each email, giving each a send date and time, a subject line, and the body. You attach recipients by adding them manually, pulling from contact lists, or importing with the Upload .csv file button — where the first column must be labelled email. (A useful constraint to know up front: once a sequence is started you can edit existing stages and add recipients, but you can't add new stages.)

Personalization: mail-merge with {{ }}

Sequences are not blast emails — they mail-merge. To drop a recipient's name or any other field into the copy, you type {{ in a stage's body or subject and Front surfaces a variable picker. Those variables pull from the columns of your uploaded CSV and from contact custom fields, so a single Stage A can greet two hundred people by name and reference their company, plan, or renewal date individually.

Front also supports fallbacks for the inevitable gaps in a CSV — the documented syntax is {{variable|'fallback'}}, so a missing first name can degrade gracefully to "there" instead of an empty space. One documented nuance worth respecting: when you're pulling data you uploaded via CSV, use the {{sequence…}} variables rather than the {{recipient…}} ones, which behave differently.

Auto-follow-up and stop-on-reply

The behaviour that makes a sequence feel intelligent is stop-on-reply. Front puts it plainly: "If a recipient sends a reply to a sequence stage, subsequent stages will not send out to their email address." The moment a prospect writes back, the follow-ups for that person halt automatically — you're not going to send a "just following up" email to someone who already answered.

The important caveat, and one Front calls out explicitly, is that automatic replies don't count. An "Out of office" bounce-back won't stop the sequence, because it isn't a real engagement — so a recipient on holiday still gets your Stage B when they're back. That's the right default, but it means your list can still receive follow-ups while they're genuinely away.

The real limits — and where it breaks down

Sequences are a genuinely capable native feature, and for staged outbound they're the right tool inside Front. But they come with hard edges that are fair to name.

Recipient cap: 200 per sequence. You can upload several CSVs, but if the combined total exceeds 200 you have to delete recipients back down before Front lets you start. For large lists, that means splitting into batches.

Stage cap: 10. Enough for most cadences, but not an open-ended nurture engine.

Deliberate send delays. To stay inside your email provider's rate limits, Front spaces sends out — 7.5 seconds between emails on Gmail and Office 365 channels, 1 second on other channel types. A full 200-recipient stage therefore takes roughly 25 minutes to finish sending. Fine for outreach; not instant.

The channel requirement — the one that stops people cold. A personal sequence requires an individual inbox with an email channel; a workspace sequence requires a shared inbox with an email channel. SMS and chat channels aren't supported at all. In practice this means the From picker only lists channels of the right kind — and if the account you're working in doesn't have an individually-connected personal sending channel, the picker returns no results and the dialog won't proceed. (That's exactly the state captured in the screenshot above: a shared-inbox Gmail alone doesn't populate a personal sequence's From field.)

Plan gating. Sequences are a Professional-plan-and-above feature — they aren't on Starter at all. Front's pricing tiers spell out where the line sits.

The analytics side-effect. This is the subtle one, and it matters if you report on inbox metrics. When you send a sequence from a shared email address, Front's analytics count each individual outbound message toward that shared inbox's New conversations metric — which then rolls up into Active conversations in the conversations view. Send a 200-person sequence and your "new conversations" number just jumped by 200, none of which are real inbound support tickets. It's documented in Front's analytics FAQs, and if you don't expect it, it quietly distorts your volume charts. Anyone tracking Front analytics seriously should segment sequence sends out of their inbound reporting.

Where an AI layer picks up

Sequences are the outbound half of the conversation. They're excellent at pushing personalized email out on a schedule and knowing when to stop — but the instant a recipient replies, the automation is done and a human is back on the hook. Every answer your outreach generates is now an inbound message someone has to read, understand, and respond to. That's the seam.

The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists for precisely that reasoning-heavy inbound work. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Front you already use through the live Macha–Front connector — it doesn't replace Front, your shared inboxes, your rules, or your sequences. You keep sending outreach with sequences; Macha's agent reads the replies that come back, understands intent rather than keywords, and drafts or sends a grounded response — pulling a real order, account, or renewal status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call. Where a sequence knows only "did they reply, yes or no," an agent can actually read what they said and handle it. If you want the mechanics, connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walks through it, and Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — sending, reading, and reasoning have different costs, and it's honest to price them that way.

The clean division of labour: let Front sequences drive the outbound cadence and stop themselves on reply, and layer an agent on top for the inbound wave those sequences create. For how the pieces fit together, see how Front rules automate the inbound side and how the wider Front shared inbox model holds it all.

FAQ

Where do I create a sequence in Front? Click Sequences in the Front navigation, choose Personal or Workspace visibility, then Create sequence. The New sequence dialog captures a name, the From sending channel, optional Cc/Bcc (one address each), and a sender name — after which Front opens the multi-step editor where you add stages, set send times, and write each email.

How many emails and recipients can a sequence have? A sequence can have 1 to 10 stages (labelled A–J), and each can go to up to 200 recipients. You can upload multiple CSV files, but if the total exceeds 200 you must trim the list before starting.

Does a Front sequence stop when someone replies? Yes. A genuine reply to any stage stops all subsequent stages for that recipient automatically. Automatic replies like "Out of office" are the exception — they do not stop the sequence, so an absent recipient still receives later stages.

What plan and channel do I need for sequences? Sequences are on the Professional plan and above. A personal sequence needs an individual inbox with an email channel; a workspace sequence needs a shared inbox with an email channel. SMS and chat aren't supported — and if no valid email sending channel is connected, the From picker shows no results and you can't create the sequence.

Why did my New conversations number jump after sending a sequence? Because when you send from a shared email address, Front counts each individual outbound sequence message toward that shared inbox's New conversations metric (which rolls into Active conversations). It's expected behaviour — segment sequence sends out of your inbound reporting so they don't distort volume charts.

Can I add AI to the replies a sequence generates without replacing Front? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Front as a live connector and runs on top of your existing inboxes — it doesn't replace them. Your sequences keep sending outbound and stopping on reply; the agent reads each inbound reply, understands intent, and drafts or sends a grounded answer.

Ready to turn the replies your outreach generates into answered conversations? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.