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Sleuth prospect engine

The record, screening and suppression system behind AI Sleuth research: a business becomes a prospect only when the research behind it is recorded with its source note, and every record is screened before it is stored.

0prospects recorded
0screened
0suppressed
0suppressions in force

Suppressions by reason: stop 0 · bounce 0 · complaint 0 · opt_out 0

The source-note rule

Source-note rule: every prospect record carries a source note of at least 10 characters after trimming. The source note is mandatory — a create whose source_note is under 10 characters is refused 422 sleuth_prospect_invalid and nothing is stored. Every statement drawn from a prospect record traces to its source note.

Screening

Screening rule: every prospect create is screened in this order, with all validation before any store — field validation (business_name 1-120 characters, trade 1-80, city 1-80, state a two-letter US state code stored uppercase, email a valid business email address stored normalized lowercase, observed_signal 1-500, pain_angle 1-500, and source_url and website, when present, http(s) URLs of at most 500 characters); then the source-note rule; then the role-risk rule, which refuses an email whose local part is postmaster, abuse, noreply, no-reply, mailer-daemon, root or webmaster with 422 sleuth_prospect_invalid; then the suppression check; then the dedupe check. A refused create stores nothing.

Dedupe

Dedupe rule: dedupe is global across all accounts. Creating a prospect whose normalized email is already recorded, or whose normalized business name, city and state are already recorded, is refused 409 sleuth_prospect_duplicate and nothing is stored. Business name and city are normalized by trimming, lowercasing and collapsing internal whitespace; state is normalized uppercase; email is normalized by trimming and lowercasing.

Suppression: immediate and permanent

Suppression rule: suppression is immediate and permanent. Adding an email to the suppression store (reason stop, bounce, complaint or opt_out) takes effect at once, flips every existing prospect record with that email — in any account — to status suppressed, and can never be removed: there is no delete and no un-suppress route. Creating a prospect whose normalized email is suppressed is refused 409 sleuth_prospect_suppressed. Re-adding an already suppressed email is idempotent: it returns the existing suppression record and never duplicates it. The suppression list is published as email hashes only — no raw email ever appears in the suppression list or the index document.

Counting

Counting rule: the usage counts in this document are computed at read time from live accounts only — sandbox and other non-live accounts are excluded. prospects_total counts prospect records stored for live accounts; prospects_screened and prospects_suppressed split that total by record status; suppressions_total counts suppression records added by live accounts, split by reason in suppressions_by_reason; prospects_by_trade counts live accounts' prospect records grouped by trade. The screening checks themselves are global across all accounts, including accounts excluded from these counts: a suppression added by any account blocks every account, and dedupe compares against every recorded prospect. No email, business name or source note ever appears in this document — counts only.

Surfaces

Machine-readable index: GET /v1/sleuth/prospect-engine · Sleuth home: /sleuth · Sending foundation: /sleuth-send. Markdown twin: /sleuth-prospects.md.