list-hygiene-judge git:20260914.9f39abfA

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---
name: list-hygiene-judge
description: Decide and record conservative contact-consent transitions from bounded engagement, bounce, and consent evidence before any send.
---

# List Hygiene Judge

Use this skill after collecting current contact evidence and before preparing a
campaign. It decides whether a contact remains eligible, needs re-permission,
must be suppressed, or needs human review. When policy justifies a state
transition, it records that decision in the operator's consent ledger with
optimistic concurrency and verifies the exact event through a second read.

This skill never sends a message and never mutates a mailing provider. A later
`send-as` run must read the current consent state again at delivery time. The
ledger records the operator's policy decision; it does not replace provider
unsubscribe or bounce data.

## Operating model

The caller supplies one bounded engagement observation, the current consent
observation, and the policy threshold that applies to the contact. The evidence
must be marked `read` and versioned to the same ledger head that the runner
reads through `data.read_projection`. Missing, stale, ambiguous, or conflicting
evidence produces `human_review` without a write.

The deterministic decision order is conservative:

1. An unsubscribe marker stops automation.
2. An existing suppression is preserved; age alone can never relax it.
3. Verified hard-bounce evidence suppresses when policy permits that automatic
   action, otherwise it stops for review.
4. A subscribed contact whose last engagement exceeds the decay threshold is
   moved to `re_permission`.
5. A clean, recent subscribed contact returns `verify` without writing.

Only `re_permission` and `suppress` can create transitions. The append uses the
observed ledger version and the caller's stable idempotency key. Readback must
match the append status, source identity, new version, event reference, event
digest, and projection digest before the result reports a recorded transition.
No-write decisions also perform a second read and require the projection to
remain unchanged.

## Authority and finality

The runner requests `runx:data:read` and, only for an admitted transition,
`runx:data:append`. These scopes authorize a bounded consent-ledger operation;
they do not authorize delivery or changes to a CRM or mailing provider. The
data-source binding owns storage and credentials.

A sealed result proves the ledger reads and any exact recorded transition. It
does not prove provider state, re-subscription, campaign approval, or delivery.
Every result therefore keeps `downstream_send.status` at `not_run` and names
`send-as` as the separate delivery boundary.

## Decisions and recovery

- `verify`: current evidence supports no transition. Nothing is appended.
- `re_permission`: engagement has decayed past policy and a subscribed contact
  must regain permission before sending. The transition is recorded once.
- `suppress`: hard-bounce evidence requires suppression, or an existing
  suppression is preserved. A write occurs only when state actually changes.
- `human_review`: evidence or policy cannot safely support automation. Nothing
  is appended.

If the ledger version changes before the decision, run again with a fresh read
and fresh evidence. Reuse an idempotency key only for the identical transition.
The runner deliberately makes no claim that a post-commit retry can recover
from the old expected version; inspect the receipt and current ledger before
deciding whether another operation is needed.

## Inputs and result

Provide the logical data source, consent-ledger resource, contact aggregate,
observed version, stable transition key, bounded engagement counts and recency,
bounce policy, and current consent evidence. Counts must be non-negative and
the policy threshold must be between 1 and 3,650 days.

The result preserves the decision and reason, the observed consent state, the
readback-bound transition identity when one was written, a human escalation
only when review is required, and the untouched downstream send boundary.

## Agent rules

- Never invent engagement, bounce, consent, or version evidence.
- Never relax suppression from contact age alone.
- Never re-permission an unsubscribed contact automatically.
- Never describe an internal ledger append as a provider update.
- Never dispatch, send, or claim delivery from this result.