Every message arriving in a monitored mailbox runs through the same deterministic pipeline. Fraud is dropped at the gate; junk is filtered next; only real candidate pitches reach the queue — fully parsed.
Stops bad actors at the door before a single scoring cycle burns. Hard-fail on blacklist / disposable provider / missing MX; flags suspicious senders on auth-header fails, phishing fingerprints, homoglyph attacks, and low vendor reputation.
A keyword + regex scorer that knows what a vendor pitch looks like. Strong signals (resume, candidate, consultant) and pitch-field signals (visa, years exp, skills) accumulate; newsletter / promo / marketing language deducts. Tuneable thresholds.
A conservative labeled-line parser pulls structured fields out of the pitch — name, title, visa, years of experience, location, skills, contact info — into a typed candidate record. Persists as pulse.vendor_candidate, ready for matching.