How do you stop a sequence when someone at the company replies?

When someone replies, stop their sequence at once. Then decide what happens to their colleagues. For most outbound, the right answer is to pause the other contacts at that company in the same campaign, because a reply from one person is the company answering.

A sequence that keeps writing to a person after they replied is an obvious error. A sequence that keeps writing to their three colleagues is the same error, and it is harder to spot.

What should stop, and what should keep going?

Cold email sequences run on a timer, so every event needs an explicit rule. This table is a good default.

Each row exists for a reason. An autoreply is not an answer, so stopping on it drops someone from the campaign because they were on holiday. A reply after the last step still means the company has responded, so the colleagues in the middle of the sequence should stop. Free-mail addresses belong to unrelated people, and a reply from one gmail.com address says nothing about another.

Why pause the colleagues?

The people you email at one company often share a mail administrator, an inbox rule and a Slack channel. They compare notes. A person who forwards your first email to a colleague has already started that conversation, and a fourth and fifth email to others in the building reads as a mass mailing. Once someone replies, the company has your message and the next step is a human conversation. Automation should step back.

What does a pause mean in practice?

Pausing is different from removing. The contact stays visible in the campaign with the reason for the pause, and you can resume them. This matters because a colleague who did not reply and did not bounce has given you no reason to drop them. After the first conversation, you may want to send them a different message, and a resume lets you do that on your terms.

How do you set this up?

Use this checklist in any tool that supports it:

1. Group contacts by company. Without a company, there is nothing to pause. A domain is the usual key, and a company name helps when two offices share one domain.
2. Write the rule for a reply. Stop the replier. Pause the rest of the company in this campaign.
3. Write the rule for a bounce. A hard bounce can mean the whole server rejected you, so the same pause applies.
4. Exclude autoreplies. Recognise out-of-office messages and keep them out of the stop rule.
5. Make pauses visible and reversible. Show the reason on every paused contact and allow a resume.
6. Check the scope. Decide whether the pause covers one campaign or every campaign, and write it down.

What are the limits of this approach?

Automatic grouping can be wrong. Two offices of the same group can sit on one domain, and a reply in Warsaw says little about Katowice. A shared domain can also be a service provider or a holding company with unrelated teams. If your accounts look like that, give each office its own company name before import. Also, a reply to one person does not mean the colleague has seen your message, so a manual follow-up to a paused colleague is a valid move.

How does anymail stop a sequence?

anymail groups contacts by company, so a reply from one person is read as the company answering. When someone replies, their own sequence stops with the reason "Prospect replied", and the other active contacts at that company in the same campaign are paused with the reason "Paused: someone else at this company replied". A pause can be resumed from the Prospects tab, because those contacts neither replied nor bounced. A reply that comes after the last step still pauses colleagues who are mid-sequence. Out-of-office replies are recognised and do not stop anything, and free-mail addresses are never grouped as a company. In campaign settings, the two checkboxes under Auto-pause for same domain control the reply rule and the bounce rule, and both are on by default. If you give two branches on one domain different company names, they count as separate companies. The sequences page covers the rest of how steps and branches work.