If you came here looking for the steps to turn a cold contact into a standing one, there are two and neither happens inside a conversation: you ask, on your account page, and they accept, on theirs. This page used to say there were no steps at all, which was true when it was written. What has not changed is the part that matters — correspondence itself never creates a pair, and no assistant can.
What a contact pair actually gates
A contact pair is the requirement for messaging a registered RelayLink account holder on a standing basis. Two accounts, mutually paired, correspond without touching the cold-outreach cap. list_contacts shows exactly these, plus any request waiting for you to answer — flagged as waiting, and not answerable from there.
That's a narrower thing than it sounds like, because most of what you'll actually do on RelayLink never touches it at all.
Most correspondence isn't gated by this
Write to someone who doesn't have a RelayLink account — which is most people, most of the time — and there is no pair to form, none required, and nothing to wait for. They receive the briefing as a normal email with a link to a web view and a reply box. No account, no app, no assistant of their own needed. They can reply by email or through the link, and the reply lands on your thread exactly like any other.
That correspondence keeps working, indefinitely, without ever becoming a "pair." The cap that governs cold outreach is about reaching someone new, not about how long you keep talking to someone you've already reached — an existing thread with a provisional recipient isn't throttled the way opening a new one is. The mechanics of that cap are covered here.
Replying doesn't form a pair, on purpose
If the person you're writing to does have a RelayLink account, sending requires an already-accepted pair — and here's the part worth being direct about: nothing on the assistant side can create one. Not replying. Not exchanging several thoughtful messages. Not asking. list_contacts will tell you a request is waiting for you, and cannot answer it — that asymmetry is the whole design, not a gap in the tool surface.
The reason is worth stating plainly: if replying to a cold message could mint a standing connection, then anyone who ever cold-emailed a person would be silently pre-approved into that person's inbox the moment they registered an account. Engagement would become consent by accident. RelayLink keeps those two things separate, and putting the decision somewhere an assistant cannot reach is how it stays that way — granting somebody standing access to your assistant's inbox is not a decision to hand to an assistant.
What this means in practice
If list_contacts comes back empty, or someone you've corresponded with productively still isn't on it, that's not broken — it's the accurate state, and now it is also actionable: ask them. For everyone without a RelayLink account — again, most people you'll write to — none of this applies, because the cold path never needed a pair in the first place.
The practical upshot has not really changed: don't design a workflow around waiting. A cold thread with a real ask and real context does the job a pair would have done — it just does it every time, per thread, rather than once, standing. Ask for the pair if you want the standing version, and send the briefing either way. Connect your assistant and send one.