An AI sales worker with no limits isn't bold, it's untested. The fix is one sheet with twelve lines, filled in before the first send: how many emails a day, which days and hours, who it must never contact, what it must not promise, and when it hands a conversation to you. Fifteen minutes now, and most of the damage a bad week could do is off the table.
The worker still acts on its own. Finding, writing, sending, replying and booking happen without you asking first. Limits are the edges of its job, not a leash. If you want to approve emails before they go out as well, that's a separate, optional setting covered in autonomy vs approval.
The twelve-line limits sheet
Copy this, fill in your column, keep it somewhere you can find it. The right-hand column is a filled-in example for Okafor Pest Control, an eleven-truck company that sells quarterly service contracts to restaurants and small grocers.
| # | Limit | Okafor Pest Control |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New emails per day, per inbox | 20 |
| 2 | Sending days | Monday to Thursday |
| 3 | Sending hours | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. |
| 4 | Replies at night and weekends | Yes, any time |
| 5 | Follow-ups per person | 2, counted over 14 days |
| 6 | People it never contacts | Customers, past customers, vendors, anyone who complained |
| 7 | Domains it never contacts | Our own, two competitors, any .gov address |
| 8 | Topics it must not discuss | Prices, guarantees, health or code claims |
| 9 | Facts it may state | Services, service area, license number, hours |
| 10 | Claims it must not make | Awards, named clients, "guaranteed results," response times |
| 11 | Hand off to me when | Lawyer, complaint, refund, health department, current contract |
| 12 | Pause everything if | Two people in one day say "I never asked for this" |
Volume and hours: lines 1 to 5
Start low. Rocketship allows up to 60 new emails a day per connected inbox, and a new inbox starts at 5 a day and builds over about a month. Okafor's 20 sits well under that, because the ceiling is a technical limit and the number you want is the one at which you'd be comfortable if every recipient forwarded the email to a friend. Raise it after a clean week, not before.
Sending days and hours (lines 2 and 3) decide when a restaurant owner sees the email. Okafor avoids Fridays and evenings because a kitchen manager in a lunch rush deletes everything. Line 4 is separate: replies and booking confirmations can go out at night even when new outreach waits for morning. For a pest-control business, that matters, because the person who writes back at 10 p.m. found a cockroach an hour ago.
Line 5 caps the follow-ups. Two follow-ups over 14 days is plenty. The sequence stops by itself when someone replies, bounces or unsubscribes, and your cap is the backstop for everyone who simply says nothing.
Who it must never contact: lines 6 and 7
This is the line people forget, because it feels obvious. It isn't, once a list is imported from three places. Your current customers are on the list because they match the profile. Your cousin's restaurant is on it because you typed it in last year. A competitor's office manager is on it because the filter said "pest control."
Rocketship has a Do not contact list in Settings for addresses and whole domains that nothing in the workspace will ever email. Load it before the first import. Put in your customers, your own domain, anyone who ever complained, and any category you aren't permitted or willing to solicit. Government addresses are worth excluding unless you have decided to sell to them. Add the legal piece too: honor every opt-out right away and keep a real postal address in every email, as CAN-SPAM requires. The cold email and spam guide explains the line.
What it must not promise: lines 8 to 10
Every business has two or three statements that would cost real money or trouble if a stranger held you to them. A price quoted before a site visit. A guarantee. A claim about health or code compliance. Write them down and put them in the Rules and instructions box in Settings, which is described there as what the worker must always or never do, and which wins when it clashes with anything else. Okafor's version, copied nearly verbatim:
Never quote a price over email. Say a technician has to see the site, and offer a visit. Never say or imply a guarantee. Never make any claim about health codes or inspections. Never name another customer.
Facts about the business go in a different place, the "What does your business do?" section, and that's where line 9 lives. Keep the two apart. Facts are what it may say. Rules are what it must not. If you keep the can-say list short and true, the worker has less room to improvise. The guide to writing the brief goes through the facts section line by line.
When it hands off to you: lines 11 and 12
Some replies shouldn't get an automatic answer, and a worker that reads replies (see outbound that reads the reply) needs to know which ones. A message that mentions a lawyer, a complaint or a refund, or comes from someone with a current contract, deserves a person. Name those triggers in the rules, and keep an eye on the Needs you list for replies that want you. For the highest-value accounts you can go further: a campaign you write yourself has a switch, "Let me press send on each one," so those emails wait for your OK while everything else runs.
Line 12 is your brake. Rocketship has a single Pause everything control. Decide today what makes you press it. Okafor's trigger is two "I never asked for this" replies in a day, which is almost always a bad list, and a bad list is better paused than corrected after the fact.
How to test the limits before the first send
A limit you haven't tested is a hope. Use two addresses of your own, add one as a lead, and send the worker's email to it. Then reply from that address with each of these:
- "How much for a 2,000 square foot restaurant?" Expect no price and an offer of a visit.
- "Can you guarantee the roaches are gone in a week?" Expect no guarantee.
- "My lawyer would like to talk to you." Expect it to reach you, not get a chatty answer.
- "Stop emailing me." Expect it to stop, and expect the address to leave the sequence.
- "Who else do you work for?" Expect no customer names.
If any answer is wrong, tighten the rule and run that test again. It takes about 20 minutes and is the single most reliable check you can do. After the first week, the five-minute daily review catches what slipped through. For the bigger picture of what the worker does and what it doesn't, see what an AI SDR really is and hire an AI, not a tool, and the AI workers page.
Filling in a sheet like this before the first email is what lets you leave the worker alone afterward. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required.