While it may seem counterintuitive, when using GMass, you want to put all your recipient email addresses in the To field, not the Cc or Bcc field. The GMass button works by taking all of the email addresses in the To field and sending an individual email message to each of those addresses.
So, if you have 500 addresses in the To field and then you compose your Subject/Message and hit the GMass button, 500 individual, personalized emails will get sent, one to each address. Each recipient will only see his/her address in the To line. This might be counterintuitive because if you’re used to hitting the standard Gmail Send button, then you’re used to seeing one email go out to all 500 people, where all 500 addresses are exposed to each other. But that’s the whole point of GMass — to split up the addresses in the To field and send one email at a time to each address.
What happens if you put one or more addresses in the Cc or Bcc field?
Each of those Cc/Bcc addresses will receive a copy of every single email message that is sent to every single person in the To field. Meaning, if you have 500 addresses in the To field, and 3 address in the Cc field, each of those 3 Cc addresses will receive 500 email messages each, one for each address in the To field. In total, this will result in 1,500 extra emails being sent from your Gmail account.
For example, if you’re sending via GMass to five recipients, and you set a Cc address, the Cc address will receive all 5 emails.
In the example above, the email is set to send to the eight recipients in the To line. If sent via GMass, each of the eight recipients will receive an individual, personalized email, and the Cc address will receive all eight email messages as well.
So what’s the purpose of using the Cc or Bcc field then?
There may be cases where you do want to have a copy of every single message sent to a Cc address. For example, if you’re a teacher sending a mass email to the parents of your 20 students with each student’s grades, and each email is personalized with the parent’s first name and the student’s grades, you may want to Cc the principal of the school. The principal of the school will receive all 20 emails sent to the 20 parents and now has proof that the communication was sent.
Additionally, you might use the Bcc field to send data to a CRM system like Salesforce.
You can get even fancier by setting individual Cc and Bcc addresses for each recipient, by setting them in a spreadsheet column. You can even personalize multiple CC and BCC addresses for every recipient on your list.
A comprehensive understanding of Cc and Bcc
If you’re still confused about how Cc and Bcc are used in general in email, please see my guide to Cc and my guide to Bcc.
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You can now send a new campaign based on actions your contacts have taken on previous campaigns. Want to send a follow up to everyone that DIDN’T open your last campaign? You can do that. Want to send a follow up to everyone that OPENED but DIDN’T CLICK your last campaign? You can do that too. Or maybe you just want to re-send to exactly everyone who received a previous campaign.
Click the “follow up” button next to the Search bar. It’s an @ symbol with an arrow.
When you click the button, you’ll get a popup where you can choose your past campaign, and then the behavioral segment to which you want to send a follow up campaign. If your original campaign was based on a Google Docs spreadsheet, then GMass will connect to the same spreadsheet to allow you to personalize the follow-up with the same data.
The behavioral segments you can choose from are:
Sent: Everyone that was a recipient of the campaign
Opened: Everyone that opened the campaign
Didn’t Open: Everyone that didn’t open the campaign
Clicked: Everyone that clicked at least one URL in the campaign
Didn’t Click: Everyone that didn’t click any URL in the campaign
Opened but didn’t click: Everyone that opened the email but didn’t click any URLs
Replied: Everyone that replied to the campaign. Note that replies take a couple hours after they reach your Inbox to be associated with the campaign.
Didn’t Reply: Everyone that did not reply to the campaign.
Opened but didn’t reply: Everyone that opened but didn’t reply to the email campaign.
Exceeded Gmail Limit: Everyone that bounced with a message indicating that your account was over limit. This segment is useful if you want to send your campaign to people that didn’t receive it the first time because you were over limit.
Gmail API Errors: Everyone that did not receive the email because there was an error when GMass attempted to connect to Gmail. These errors are rare, but you may want to re-send the campaign to those that didn’t receive it the first time because of errors.
Blocks: Everyone that didn’t receive the email because of a spam rejection. After you’ve addressed the issue causing the spam rejection (usually a tracking domain issue), you can use this option to re-send the campaign to these people, since they didn’t get your email the first time.
You can also send follow-up campaigns based on who replied or who didn’t reply to a previous campaign. GMass’s reply management feature organizes replies, bounces, and other types of responses into different Gmail Labels after you send an email marketing campaign. Since that feature gives us the ability to tell who replied and who didn’t reply, we have now been able to enhance the follow-up campaigns feature to allow you to also follow up based on who replied and who didn’t.
Just click the follow-up campaigns button next to the Search bar, choose a past campaign, and choose from one of the new behaviors listed:
1. People who replied
2. People who didn’t reply
3. People who opened but didn’t reply
Note: If you’re a power GMass user, it’s essential that you follow us on Twitter. This announcement is for follow up campaigns that you have to send manually, but what I’m working on next will truly blow you away — automated follow-up drip campaigns, where you upload a lead list, and then we send the list a personalized message every few days until you get a response. There are lots of tools to send drip campaigns already, but none with a tight Gmail integration. Stay tuned for that!
GMass has its weak areas as well. I know that our Reporting could be much better, we don’t support Google’s Inbox yet, and I’m aware of GMass conflicting with other popular Gmail extensions, like Sidekick. These issues will be addressed soon.
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If you’re an email marketer using Gmail or Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) as your email sending platform, you probably want to understand just how many emails you can send through your Gmail account.
First, distinguish between a regular Gmail account and a Google Workspace account. A regular Gmail account is an account with an address containing the domain gmail.com or googlemail.com. Google Workspace, the business product of Google, means your email addresses contain your organization’s domain, like [email protected] or [email protected]. In this case, acme.com or wordzen.com is a domain whose email is controlled by Gmail. You can log in to your business’s email account by way of Gmail.
What are the basic Gmail sending limits?
Regular Gmail or Google Workspace free trial accounts have a limit of 500 individual emails/day.
The limits I’ve described above apply only if you’re sending individual emails to one recipient only, the kind that would be sent if you’re using GMass. They apply on a rolling 24 hour basis. That means that if you have a regular Gmail account and you send 500 emails at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, and it takes 10 minutes for the emails to send, you won’t be able to send any more emails until 2:10 p.m. on Thursday. Another example: if you send 100 emails from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, and 400 emails between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Wednesday, then you won’t be able to send any emails until 2 p.m. on Thursday, at which time you’ll be able to send a max of 100 emails. After 4 p.m., you’ll be able to send more.
There are other limits in effect if you’re sending say, one email with 10 email addresses in the To field, and limits if you have your account set to auto-forward, and other limits explained in the URLs referenced above.
A special trick you can try, but that I haven’t tested
If you’re a Google Workplace customer, you can configure your account to use Gmail’s own SMTP relay server (smtp-relay.gmail.com) and send 10,000 emails per account per day with a maximum sending capacity of a whopping 4,600,000 emails per day across all of your Google Workplace accounts. Don’t believe me? Google states it right here.
What happens if you exceed your Gmail account limits?
When you hit your email sending limit, Gmail will show one of these error messages:
#1: “You have reached a limit for sending mail. your message was not sent”
If your account exceeds 500 emails in a single 24-hour period, then future outgoing messages will be blocked from Gmail or Google Workspace free trial accounts. As a paid Workspace subscriber, you can gain an increased limit of 2000 emails per day. To reach this goal, you must be a paid Google Workspace subscriber for over two months and your organization needs to have cumulatively paid $100 or more.
If you’re logged into Gmail, and your account is at its limit, this is what happens when you hit the Send button:
The message refused to send and remains as an unsent Draft in your account.
If you’re using any kind of external app to send emails through your Gmail account, the app will be able to successfully connect to your account and place the email in your Sent Mail folder, however, the email won’t actually send. Instead, you’ll get a bounce notification indicating the email hasn’t been sent because you are over your limit.
Solution: Use GMass to spread out your email campaign over multiple days without exceeding the daily email sending limit. When GMass detects that you are approaching the limits set by Gmail, it will automatically pause the current campaign from sending additional emails until another day has passed.
#2: “You have attempted to send mail to too many recipients at once. your message was not sent”
You may see this error message if you’re emailing 500 or more recipients in a single email.
Solution: You can send personalized bulk emails through your Gmail account with GMass. GMass utilizes different methods to send individual campaigns so that they do not exceed the Gmail recipient limit.
There’s another kind of Google limit which some Gmail accounts hit that isn’t directly related to how many emails you’ve sent but rather how quickly you sent them. This is called a “rate limit” error, and you’ll know if you’ve sent emails too fast because you’ll see this error when you try to send:
This is a Gmail API error. Meaning, you won’t see this error during the regular course of using your Gmail or G Suite account, but you might see this error in warning messages when sending mail merges or cold email campaigns with Gmail. If GMass encounters this error when sending one of your campaigns, we pause your campaign for an hour and throttle the sending speed when it resumes. Meaning, your campaign will resume sending in an hour, but this time, there will be a 5-10 second space in between emails.
How to check your email sending limit in Gmail
Gmail doesn’t provide an easy way of determining how many emails you’ve sent over the last 24 hours, other than looking at your Sent Mail folder and manually counting, but GMass calculates this for you and displays it. Click the Show usage button in the GMass Settings box to see how many emails you’ve sent over the prior 24 hours. This will help you determine how many emails you can send at any given time.
Click “Show usage” to have GMass count how many emails you’ve sent in the last 24 hours.
How does GMass manage your account’s sending limits?
You can send a mail merge campaign through GMass to several thousand email recipients in one shot. GMass employs several methods for sending large campaigns through your Gmail account but here are the steps we take when simply distributing a campaign over multiple days.
GMass will automatically distribute your email campaign over multiple days to avoid exceeding your account’s limits. For example, if you have a Google Apps account, where your limit is 2,000 sent emails/day, and you want to send a campaign to 10,000 people, GMass will evenly distribute your campaign at 2,000 emails/day for 5 consecutive days.
GMass counts how many emails you’ve sent through your account over the past 24 hours when calculating how many emails in your campaign can be sent right now. Let’s say that you’ve sent 15 “regular” emails through your G Suite account in the last 24 hours using the blue Gmail Send button, and now you’re sending a 2,500 person campaign. GMass will send 1,985 emails now, and 515 emails 24 hours later. In cases where you’re mixing send types, sending some campaigns natively with Gmail and sending some campaigns over SMTP, GMass will count only the emails sent natively through your Gmail account when determining where you fall within your Gmail account’s limits.
GMass will pause sending of your email campaign when it detects that you’ve exceeded your account limits. It does this by analyzing the number of your sent emails over the prior 24 hours and scanning for bounce notifications in your account that indicate you’re over your limit. When this happens, GMass will pause your campaign and retry in one hour.
How can you re-send emails to addresses that bounced because you were over your limit?
If you received the dreaded bounce that is “from” [email protected] with the Subject “You have reached a limit for sending mail”, you probably want to resend your email to the recipients that resulted in this bounce.
Fun fact: In the summer of 2019, Gmail changed the From Address associated with these “over limit” bounces. They used to come from [email protected] but now they come from [email protected].
In most cases, GMass will automatically re-queue these specific email addresses for your campaign. That means you don’t have to take any action, and when it’s determined that your account can send again, or if your campaign gets re-routed to an external SMTP server, then these addresses that bounced the first time will subsequently get your email.
In certain situations though you may want to manually re-send your email to the email addresses that bounced.
This is the tool to manually re-send the emails that bounced because you were over the limit.
1. Click the red @ button near the Gmail Search bar. This launches the segmentation tool.
2. Choose the campaign from the dropdown that experienced the blocking.
3. Under Behaviors, choose Over Limit.
4. Next click the main COMPOSE FOLLOW-UP button.
5. A Gmail Compose window will launch and the To field will be filled with the addresses you want to send to, the addresses that previously blocked your campaign.
6. Next load the content of your campaign by clicking the GMass Settings arrow and choosing your original campaign from the Campaigns dropdown. Your Subject and Message will be set.
7. Lastly, ensure all other GMass Settings are how they should be, such as Tracking of opens and clicks, and make sure the Schedule is set to the desired time of sending.
8. Finally, hit the red GMass button to send. Your campaign will now go to the email addresses that blocked you the first time.
Those are the fundamentals of Gmail’s and Google Workspace’s email sending limits and how GMass navigates those limits to allow you to send large mail merge campaigns. Remember that you can use the GMass unlimited sending feature to avoid these limits altogether.
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Update on 3/22/16:This feature has been enhanced. Bounces are now detected automatically and bounced addresses are suppressed in future email campaigns. This is part of the new Automatic Reply Management feature.
I just deployed a hack that lets you pull bounces from your Gmail account so that future GMass mail merge campaigns skip sending to those bounced addresses. If you already have a history of sending mail merge campaigns through your Gmail account with GMass, you’ve likely accumulated some bounce-backs. You already get ridiculously high email delivery rates when using GMass, but avoiding repeatedly sending to bounced addresses will optimize your email delivery even further.
This is a hack, and in time we will release a better bounce handling mechanism. For now though, here’s how to pull your bounce list and prevent GMass from sending to past bounces:
1. Use the Gmail search tool to search for “from:[email protected]”, and then search. This will show all of the bounce notifications you’ve received.
2. Next, click the GMass “Build Email List” button. This process could take a few minutes to complete if you have a lot of bounces in your Gmail account.
3. After it’s done, a new message will launch with all of your bounced addressed in the To field. Simply discard this message by hitting the Trash button in the lower right corner. GMass has now captured all of your bounced addresses and added them to our internal database. Now, if you attempt to send to any of these bounced addresses, GMass will skip over them.
That’s it!
In the future, we will automate the process of plucking bounced addresses from your account and adding them to our database, so that you don’t have to go through this manual process. Stay tuned for that.
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If you have a scheduled mail merge campaign, it will show under the GMass Scheduled Label.
You have a few options to cancel the campaign.
Cancel from the GMass settings box
Find the campaign under the GMass Scheduled Label or in your Gmail Drafts folder, open the Draft, click the GMass Settings arrow, and hit the Cancel button.
Cancel from the GMass dashboard
Head to your GMass dashboard. You’ll see your campaign under the Current Campaigns tab. Click the red X button to cancel.
Notes on canceling campaigns
These methods also work on a large campaign that has been set to send over multiple days. If after a couple of days, you decide you don’t want the rest of it to send, follow the same procedure to prevent further sending.
If the campaign is in the process of sending right now, then hitting the Cancel button will attempt to stop the current send and prevent future emails for the campaign from sending. If sending is in progress, up to 50 emails may send before sending is stopped.
If you have auto follow-up messages scheduled with this campaign, a pop-up window will give you the option to cancel just the campaign, cancel the campaign and all future auto follow-ups, or both. (Here’s more on canceling auto follow-ups.)
One final note: Another way to cancel a campaign is to delete the email from your Drafts, or remove the GMass Scheduled label. However, those methods are more prone to error; for instance, it wouldn’t necessarily stop auto follow-ups from a large campaign already in progress. The “cleanest” methods are the two listed in this article.
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