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How approval works

By default, every sequence Swan builds requires your approval before the first message goes out. You can tell Swan explicitly to send a sequence automatically, without approval, and it will only skip approval when you’ve said so — otherwise sequences always wait for a human decision before contacting anyone. Approval happens at the sequence level. The first time a contact is queued into a sequence, all of it — every step, across email and LinkedIn — sits in the approval queue together. Approving unlocks the entire sequence for that contact; you don’t approve each step individually, and there’s no separate per-step approval to turn on.

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Where to approve

You can approve or reject from either place, and both stay in sync:
  • In the app, at Outreach → Sequences — open the sequence contact and its pending items show up alongside the rest of that contact’s timeline.
  • In Slack, if your workspace has Swan’s Slack app connected — pending approvals post to your notifications channel with Approve and Ignore/Deny buttons.
If the same approval is actioned in both places (for example, approved via Slack after already being approved in the app), Swan recognizes it was already decided and doesn’t double-process it.

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Editing before you approve

While a sequence is waiting on your approval, you’re not limited to a plain approve or reject — you can edit the subject and body of its messages first. In the app you edit inline; in Slack, clicking approve on a message opens a modal with editable subject and body fields. When you approve with edits, two things happen:
  1. The edited copy is what actually gets sent.
  2. If this is the contact’s first approved message in the sequence, your edited version is saved as a message example that Swan draws on when writing future outreach for similar contacts. See writing and personalization for how these examples get used. Editing a follow-up step (not the first message) updates that step but isn’t saved as a new example, since it’s treated as an isolated edit rather than a repeatable pattern.

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Rejecting a sequence

You approve or reject the whole proposed sequence for a contact, not individual steps. Rejecting it removes that contact from the queue and nothing further sends to them. This only affects that one contact — it doesn’t touch other contacts running the same sequence. If you reject, Swan doesn’t retry that contact automatically — you’d need to build a new outreach for them if you change your mind later.

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Common questions

Do I have to approve every message in a sequence, or just the first one? Just once, at the sequence level. Approving the queued sequence unlocks the whole thing for that contact — every step, across email and LinkedIn — so you don’t sign off on each message separately. Can I bulk-approve everything in the queue? Approve from Outreach → Sequences in the app, one sequence at a time; there isn’t a single button that clears the entire queue at once. What happens to my edits if I don’t click approve? Edits aren’t saved until you approve — there’s no separate save action, so navigating away without approving discards them. Can I make Swan skip approval entirely for future sequences? Yes, but only if you explicitly instruct Swan to send automatically for that sequence; it’s not a persistent account-wide toggle that silently turns approval off everywhere. There’s no org-level auto-send setting, and while a per-sender approval flag exists in the backend, it defaults to requiring approval and isn’t user-editable — so auto-send still comes down to per-sequence instruction. Why did my edit to a follow-up message not show up as a suggested example later? Only the first message in a sequence (per contact) is eligible to become a saved example when approved — later follow-up steps update that step’s content but aren’t captured as reusable examples.