External approvals

Not every decision belongs to someone with a Thread login. The account executive who owns the relationship, a partner, a stakeholder on the customer’s side — sometimes they’re the right person to approve a draft. External approvals let them decide from a link, verified by a one-time code, with no account and no sign-in. There are two ways an approval reaches an outside person:

• You send it from the Inbox — any approval you could decide yourself can be routed out.
• An agent requests it directly — an agent can be instructed to seek an outside approver as part of its work, delivered by email or as a Slack DM.

Either way, the link and code are minted server-side and the decision commits through the same path as an in-app approval.

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Sending an approval from the Inbox

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What the external approver sees

The link opens a branded approval page — no Thread login, no account creation:

1. Verify identity. The page asks for the one-time code from the message (or sends a fresh one to the approver’s email — codes are short-lived, and a resend is one click). Only the address the approval was sent to can pass the gate.
2. Review the item as drafted. The page renders the full draft read-only — the email body, the proposed action, the calendar event. There is no edit surface for external approvers: the choice is approve as drafted or reject.
3. Decide. Approve, or Reject with a reason that goes back to the agent.

Once decided, revisiting the link shows a calm “already decided” page — a link can never commit the same decision twice.

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Slack DM delivery

When an agent is set up to deliver an external approval over Slack, the approver gets a DM instead of an email. For straightforward decisions — drafted emails, stage advances, proposed agent actions, calendar events — the DM carries Approve and Reject buttons right in Slack, plus an Open in Thread button to the full approval page. Richer items (CRM record writes, long-form documents) always route through the link, so nobody approves a complex change from a two-line card. Slack delivery resolves the recipient by exact email match against your connected Slack workspace. If the person can’t be found there, the request fails visibly — it never silently falls back to a different recipient.

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The pending-items page

An external approver with several open items doesn’t have to dig through old emails. From any approval page, a verified approver can open their pending items page: every open, still-actionable item addressed to their email in your org, with the one they clicked from listed first. The page is read-only — each item links through to its own approval page to act. The session is scoped to that verified email and expires; when it does, the approver simply verifies again. If your org has invited them to become a full Thread user, the page mentions the pending invite.

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How the decision flows back

The external decision commits through the same trust boundary as an in-app decision — nothing about the outcome is different because it came from outside:

• On approve, the paused agent resumes and carries out the work as drafted.
• On reject, the agent receives the reason and adjusts or escalates, exactly as if you had rejected it in the Inbox.
• Your inbox row leaves Waiting on external and resolves into your history shelves on its own — there’s nothing to tidy up.

If an approval expires undecided, the link stops working and the item re-surfaces in your Inbox as an exception, so a stalled outside approver becomes your problem to solve rather than a silent gap.

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