March 2016 - Mass Email & Mail Merge for Gmail

While I hate to encourage people to remove GMass from their Gmail accounts, there are several legitimate reasons you may want to.

Phishing Attack Victim?

Over the last week, several Gmail users have been victims of a sophisticated phishing attack where the scammer obtains the username and password for a Gmail account, logs in, installs GMass, then sends a mass email containing a form that looks like a Dropbox form to all the user’s contacts, and encourages the victim to log into Dropbox with his/her Gmail account credentials. Then, after obtaining more Gmail account credentials, the scammer logs into those accounts, installs GMass, and repeats the cycle.

If you are seeing mass emails sent from your Gmail account that you did not initiate, you may have unwittingly given your Gmail credentials to the scammer. To rectify this:

1. Change your username and password immediately.

2. To check if the scammer has connected GMass to your account, go to:

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

If GMass is listed here, and you are not a GMass user needing to send email campaigns, you can easily remove GMass.

Need to cancel a scheduled email marketing campaign?

If you are a legitimate GMass user and only wish to cancel a scheduled email marketing campaign but intend to use GMass later, then you do not need to remove GMass from your account to prevent the email from sending. Follow these instructions instead to cancel a scheduled emailing.

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?

GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Email Marketing Works Wonders for Gaining New and Keeping Current Customers

Russell Nohelty is an LA-based writer, director, producer, and successful businessman. With a resume like that you wonder how he also finds time to help others operate and grow their businesses.

He’s an entrepreneur who shares his experience and expertise with other aspiring writers and business owners, which is nice to see in today’s competitive business environment.

Nohelty has owned and operated cell phone companies and other businesses, and currently owns the publishing company www.wannabepress.com. He also produces a podcast series called “The Business of Art” which is available through iTunes. Russell says “the Business of Art aims to demystify business for artists and art for businessmen, though we really only do the former. Every week a new guest talks about how they run successful businesses.”

Wannabe Press occupies the bulk of Russell’s time, and he grows that company using several digital channels including email marketing and social media.

“Email marketing is an art unto itself,” Russell told us recently. “There are different approaches to different targeted customers, depending on the message and the goal.” Nohelty uses one of the large bulk-email services for sending his newsletter every month, which cultivates readers through a contact form on his website. These are usually sent to large numbers of recipients and the average open rates is about 25%.

Mr. Nohelty uses GMass for more personalized campaigns, and the number of recipients for these campaigns runs from 100 to 500 people. “GMass works great for smaller, targeted campaigns, and one of the reasons I love it is the response rate, said Russell. “Fifty to sixty percent open rates are common, which is unheard of in the email marketing business, but that’s what I see on a regular basis.”

The energetic entrepreneur uses short subject lines and keeps the messages brief as well. “The

personalization feature and the fact that the email is coming directly from me to my customer creates an intimate business connection that is effective beyond anything I would have expected,” said Russell.

The other GMass features like tracking, scheduling, and automatic reply management help Nohelty manage his campaigns efficiently and while GMass is free right now, he is confident he’ll keep using the Chrome extension if they eventually do begin charging a monthly or usage fee.

“Being an entrepreneur means being aware of every tool available to help me grow, and there will always be a place in my marketing toolbox for GMass.”

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?

Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

We’ve just launched a new feature which automatically organizes replies to your Gmail email marketing campaigns. Bounces, replies, block-notifications, and other types of replies received after you send a mass email campaign with GMass will now be categorized for you under the “GMass Reports” label. This means that you no longer have to sift through countless bounces and replies trying to determine which responses are the important ones you need to see.

You’ll notice two new sub-Labels under “GMass Reports”: “Bounces” and “Replies”. Based on your particular email campaigns, you may also notice the sub-Labels “Blocks”, “Delays”, and “Over Limit”.

Here are the details on each reply management category:

Bounces: Bounce notifications indicating that an email address you sent to is invalid. These are removed from your Inbox and placed under the Bounces Label. Additionally, the bounced address is added to your account’s bounce list, and further attempts to send to this email address will be suppressed by GMass. This means that you no longer have to manually extract bounces from your Gmail account. (If you click the regular Gmail “Send” button, however, you can still send to bounced addresses.) You also have granular control over your account’s bounce list. See this post on how to manage your account’s bounce list or have your account ignore bounces.

Replies: Human-based replies where a person clicked the “Reply” button and sent an email in response to your email marketing campaign. Replies remain in your Inbox and are also tagged with the Replies Label.

Delays: Delays are a type of soft-bounce that occurs when Google is unable to transmit an email message but will attempt to later on. Usually “delay” bounces are received if the email server for your recipient is temporarily down. Delay notifications are removed from your Inbox and placed under the Delays Label.

Blocks: Blocks are a special type of bounce indicating that your email was rejected because the receiving email server determined it contained spam like content. Block notifications will be rare since emails sent with GMass almost always land in the Inbox. Block notifications remain in your Inbox and are also tagged with the Blocks Label. If you notice blocks after sending an email campaign, contact our Support team so we can determine what is causing the block and how to resolve it.

Over Limit: These are special types of bounces generated by Gmail indicating that an email wasn’t sent because your Gmail account has exceeded its daily quota. GMass attempts to prevent you from exceeding your limits to begin with, but in some cases your account may still generate these notificaitons. Over Limit emails are removed from the Inbox and placed under the Over Limit Label.

Other points to note about automatic reply filtering:

GMass’s reply management system only works on replies/bounces sitting in your Inbox. If you manually move these from your Inbox and into a separate Gmail Label, or if you delete them before the GMass reply scanner processes them, then they will not be categorized for you.
Thanks to GMass’s instant reply and bounce detection, introduced in August 2023, these labels should appear almost immediately.
This was a difficult feature to build, and I’m especially proud of the algorithm I derived and the computational efficiencies I achieved when writing the code for this feature. GMass already excels as the most powerful email marketing platform for Gmail and Google Apps, but now GMass is the only Gmail-based email marketing solution that can automatically manage replies.

And now, you can use GMass’s tool The Reply Project to write ultra quick responses to the replies to your campaign.

Just head to the GMass dashboard and click on the number of replies to your campaign…

…or click on the number of replies in the web-based campaign report.

In both cases, you’ll see a flyout panel on the right showing you the replies to the campaign (along with sentiment analysis on those replies). You’ll also see a link to Reply to these emails with The Reply Project.

Reply flyout panel
That will open all the replies on one screen. You can type quick responses, or use templates or ChatGPT for even faster responses.

With these features GMass continues to make it faster and easier to find replies to your campaign and quickly respond — making sure nothing slips through the cracks in the process.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

This post was updated on July 2, 2016 with a new method to set your signature with GMass.

If you’re used to having your Gmail signature show up automatically in every email you compose or reply to, you might be perplexed as to why your signature doesn’t automatically appear in certain GMass campaigns. You set your Gmail signature under your Gmail Settings, shown below:

When you click the COMPOSE button to compose a new message from scratch, the signature will always appear in the Message. You then put in your recipients, Subject, Message, and hit the GMass button if you’re sending an email marketing campaign. Or, hit the regular Gmail Send button if you’re not sending an email campaign.

If, however, you use one of these GMass features, the Compose window that is launched will NOT have your signature from your Gmail Settings:

1. Connect to Google Sheets
2. Build a list from search results
3. Send a follow-up campaign

These three features correspond to the three buttons GMass adds next to the Gmail search bar. The Compose window launched in these instances will contain your email list addresses in the To field, but not your Signature in the body.

The reason your Gmail signature won’t appear in the Compose window when you use one of these features has to do with the nature in which the Compose window is launched. GMass uses the Gmail API for much of its functionality, and in these cases, GMass creates a blank Draft behind the scenes and then launches the Draft as a Compose window in these three cases. The Gmail API, however, does not have a method that allows GMass to retrieve a user’s signature programatically. Therefore when GMass creates the blank draft with the Gmail API and sets the To addresses, there is no way for GMass to also insert your signature into the body. When you click the COMPOSE button, it is Gmail itself that is launching the window, and Gmail obviously has access to your signature. If Gmail enhanced its API to make users’ signatures available through a method call, then we could insert your signature in every Compose window, even if it’s launched via the three aforementioned features.

Update as of July 2, 2016: We have just created a new technique to save your signature with GMass. Now even if GMass launches the Compose window, it can insert your signature. You just have to save your signature with GMass first. Here’s how to save your signature with GMass.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

If you’re using GMass to send email marketing campaigns through your Gmail account, note that the From Name that you set in your Gmail Settings may not be the From Name that is used when your email campaign is sent.

While this article is about ensuring the From Name is correct, please also see our recent post about ensuring the right From Address, which is relevant if your Gmail account is configured to use multiple From Addresses.

How to ensure the right From Name depends on whether you have multiple From Addresses configured for your account or just the default Gmail address.

Multiple From Addresses (dropdown shows up)

Do you have a From Address dropdown show up when you launch a new Compose window? If so, then you have multiple From Addresses configured. If this is the case, then everything will work as expected, and the From Name/Address that you choose from the dropdown menu will be used in your mail merge campaign when using the GMass button. You don’t need to read the rest of this article, because it doesn’t apply to you.

Just one From Address (no dropdown)

In this account, there is no From Address dropdown because I haven’t configured any alias From Addresses. So ensuring the right From Name for GMass campaigns is trickier.

If you haven’t configured any alias From Addresses for your Gmail or G Suite account, meaning you do NOT have a From Address dropdown when you open a new Compose window, then setting the From Name for your GMass campaigns is a bit trickier. In this case, the From Name that GMass detects is the name set for your overall Google account, not the Name set in your Gmail settings.

In your Gmail Settings, you can change the From Name used when you send emails. Unfortunately this name will only be used when you use the regular Gmail Send button. Using the GMass button will not cause your set From Name to be used. GMass will use the From Name that is tied to your overarching Google Account.

Setting a different From Name here won’t take effect in your GMass campaigns.

You must change the name associated with your Google Account, not just your Gmail Settings, in order to set a different From Name for GMass campaigns. How do you do this? It depends on whether you have a Gmail or a G Suite account.

Regular Gmail Users

Go to https://accounts.google.com and navigate to the area where you can change your name. If you change your name, it will take at least 10 minutes for this change to be reflected in your Gmail account.

G Suite Users

Go to https://admin.google.com and navigate to the area where you can rename a user. Note the various warnings associated with changing a user’s name. Also, you must be an administrator for your domain’s Google Suite account to be able to change a user’s name (even your own). If you change your name, it will take at least 10 minutes for this change to be reflected in your Gmail account.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

You can set any From Address that’s configured in your Gmail account as the From Address of your mail merge campaign when using GMass. Just select the From Address you want from the From dropdown in the Compose window. If you haven’t set up an alias From Address in your Gmail account, this is how you do it.

Note that you’ll need the outbound SMTP credentials of the server for the domain of the new From Address. This also means that emails sent using this alias will route through that external SMTP server and not through Gmail’s servers.

Change the From Address of your Gmail message. The From Address you set here will be reflected in your mail merge campaign when using GMass.

The From Name might need to be set separately

Please see this separate article on setting the correct From Name for your GMass campaigns. If you have multiple From Addresses configured for your Gmail account, then the From Name used for GMass campaigns will always be what you see in the dropdown in the Compose window. But if you don’t have a From Address dropdown, then the From Name might be different than you’d expect.

In the example above, I do have a From Address dropdown, so I don’t have to do anything additional to ensure the correct From Name.

A little history

In the past, Gmail allowed you to send from an alternate From Address using Gmail’s own servers. Meaning, Gmail didn’t require you to add SMTP server credentials to set up an alias address. Now, however, they do require this. That change is described here in this StackExchange article and this unofficial Google blog. If you happen to have set up an alias From Address before the SMTP server requirement was enacted, you are grandfathered in and can send “from” this alternate address using Gmail’s high deliverability email servers.

As far as GMass is concerned, there used to be a bug involving switching the Compose window to a different From Address, where sometimes changing the From Address wouldn’t always be reflected in your mail merge campaign unless you made one more change to the Subject or Message after setting the From Address. It would happen because of how and when Gmail saves a message that is being worked on. Basically Gmail doesn’t save the message when a change to the From Address is made, but now, the library that GMass’s user interface is based on, InboxSDK, added a new event called fromContactChanged that allows us to trick the Compose window into saving the message after a From Address change. Therefore this bug no longer exists, meaning you no longer have to make that additional change after setting the From Address. So, you can now choose to set the From Address as the very last thing you do before you hit the GMass button.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.