What fires it
This trigger only fires for a reply tied to a sequence: the incoming message has to come from a contact Swan has enrolled in a sequence, on the same sender account Swan used to reach out to them. The enrollment doesn’t have to still be running — a reply that lands on an old thread after the sequence finished or stopped still fires the trigger. What doesn’t fire it is a message with no sequence behind it at all: an inbound email or LinkedIn message from someone Swan never contacted through a sequence. Replying to a sequence still finishes that contact’s progress on its own, independent of this trigger — see replies and stop conditions. The trigger runs in addition to that, not instead of it. On email, Swan filters out automated messages before they ever reach the trigger: out-of-office and auto-reply messages (detected from the subject line, across several languages) and mail fromnoreply@, no-reply@, no_reply@, and mailer-daemon@-style sender addresses. Standard bounce notifications are almost always sent from a mailer-daemon@ address, so most of them are filtered out at this stage and never fire the trigger.
On LinkedIn, the only messages filtered out are reactions and read receipts — there’s no auto-reply concept to filter beyond that, so a real reply message always reaches the trigger.
Several messages, one run
If the same contact sends several messages in quick succession on the same channel, Swan doesn’t start a separate run for each one. It collects them — up to 20 messages, or 5 minutes, whichever comes first — and runs your instructions once with all of those messages together. A rapid back-and-forth doesn’t turn into a run per message.The default trigger
Swan creates a message-received trigger automatically whenever a sending account (email or LinkedIn) connects — including when an existing sender reconnects or recovers after a disconnection — if you don’t already have one. A disabled trigger counts as “already have one”: Swan won’t create a fresh trigger over a reply trigger you’ve turned off, only over one you’ve deleted. It’s created as a personal trigger, scoped to you — each person who connects a sender gets their own reply trigger, rather than the whole org sharing a single one. If you connected your email or LinkedIn before this trigger existed, one wasn’t created for you at the time — but the next reconnect or recovery of that sender creates it automatically. You don’t have to wait for that: create it yourself from Triggers → New trigger (type “Message Received”), or just ask Swan in chat to set up a reply trigger for you. Its default instructions:- Read the account’s memory and the sequence that produced the reply, to understand why you reached out.
- Classify the reply: bounce, auto-reply (out of office or similar), not interested, neutral/unclear, or positive/a question.
- Act on the classification — research a corrected email and start a new sequence for a bounce, reschedule to resume after the stated return date for an auto-reply, move the contact’s funnel stage if they’re not interested, or draft a reply and open a task for your review if they responded with interest or a question.
- Update the account’s memory with what came in and what was done about it.
Example uses
- Draft a response to an interested reply and put it in front of you as a task instead of leaving it to sit in your inbox.
- Route positive replies to the right teammate based on account ownership.
- Move a contact’s funnel stage automatically when they reply that they’re not interested.