Two separate questions
PULSE keeps two facts apart. Consent is permission: may we send this person marketing at all? The sending tier is relationship: has this person ever deliberately engaged with us, so that mailing them from our own domain is safe? A contact can be consented and cold (they signed up and never opened anything) or engaged with consent unknown (a client who replies to every proposal). Both facts show on the contact record under Privacy & Consent.
Consent mode
Settings → Workspace sets the mode for the whole workspace. Opt-out (CCPA) markets to everyone unless the contact withdraws. Opt-in (GDPR) markets only to contacts who explicitly granted consent. Withdrawn always wins, and every campaign and sequence honors it. A contact's consent can be granted or withdrawn on their record, with a history of who changed it and when.
Double opt-in on web forms
A web form can tick "Confirm by email before adding to marketing" in its submit settings. The contact is created as pending: they get a "please confirm" email and receive no campaigns until they click the link. A typo'd or hostile address never enters your list as consented. A contact who was already granted is never downgraded by a later form submission.
Engaged or cold
Every night PULSE assesses each contact's sending tier. Engaged means they did something deliberate: replied, clicked a link, filled in a form, answered a questionnaire, took a call or meeting, have a won deal, or explicitly opted in. Everyone else is cold. Opens do not count — Apple Mail opens messages before anyone reads them, so an open-based tier would put a silent list onto your reputation.
With "Only send campaigns to people who have engaged" on (Settings → Email → Sending limits), campaigns from your own domain reach engaged contacts only. Cold contacts are still reachable — through an external cold-email tool on its domains rather than yours. A campaign can be exported for that tool, or pushed straight to one you have connected. Check the audience panel on a campaign before switching this on: it shows how many contacts it would hold back.
People you already know
A real relationship often lives outside PULSE — a customer of another product you run, an account imported from your old system — and arrives as a field, not an event. Settings → Email → People you already know lets you say "contacts matching this condition have an existing relationship with us": for example, Store customer equals Yes. The nightly assessment then counts them as engaged, and each contact's record names the rule that did it. Saving a rule asks you to confirm the relationship claim, and records who confirmed it and when. A rule never grants consent and never stops the sunset below.
Contacts who go quiet
A contact who has not opened, clicked, replied, answered a questionnaire, or taken a call in the sunset window (12 months by default, in Sending limits) drops out of broad campaign audiences. They are not deleted or unsubscribed; you can still email them individually, they still get invoices, and a campaign can deliberately include them. Before letting a quiet segment go, use Re-engage the quiet on the Campaigns page: it opens a draft aimed at exactly those contacts with a plain starter message asking whether they still want to hear from you. Whoever clicks becomes engaged again.