30% of my journalist outreach hit a black hole and looked like it worked

I shipped this last week. Caught the bug yesterday.

The setup: Gmail scanner pulls journalist requests from SoS, Qwoted, Featured, HARO. Claude classifies tier (Hot/Warm/Cold). Telegram + dashboard panel for triage: Approve / Skip / Send buttons.

The bug: 30% of inbound sources don't accept email replies. Qwoted and Featured are platform-only pitch flows behind a credit paywall (1 Qwoted credit per pitch, you start with 7). Every "Send" my system did on those was a no-op going to a notification address that doesn't forward.

The worst part wasn't the bug; I usually catch bugs in the testing period. It was the bug being invisible. The dashboard said sent, and the API returned 200. Even the system thought it was working.

Fix:

1. Source policy map (platform-pitch vs reply-email)

2. Skip Claude drafting for platform-pitch sources (saves tokens, also removes a button that does nothing)

3. Regex the per-opportunity URL out of the email body at scan time

4. Send button routes to the platform URL on those sources

Then a worse one surfaced. Source of Sources sends ONE email containing 8 to 15 distinct journalist queries, each with a different reply address. My agent was treating each email as one opportunity, sending the draft to peter@sourceofsources, who doesn't forward to any of the journalists.

Pivot: split the input at scan time, create one opportunity per query, dedupe per (gmail_id, journalist_email). Threading guard added so replies to aggregator inboxes don't blur N journalist conversations into one thread on Gmail.

Numbers:

- 8x fewer wasted Claude calls per SoS digest

- 100% of Send actions now do something real

- Dashboard hides Approve buttons that don't apply

Audit your Send path before your token bill does.

Happy to share the flow if anyone wants to apply it.

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30% of my journalist outreach hit a black hole and looked like it worked