August 2016 - Mass Email & Mail Merge for Gmail

There are lots of reasons why you may need to stop GMass from sending emails from your Gmail account: GMass may have started sending a multi-day campaign, but then in the middle, you decide you want to stop. You may have set auto follow-ups on a particular campaign, but you can’t handle the volume of replies you’re getting, so you may want to stop GMass from sending any more auto follow-ups. Your account may have been hacked, and the hacker installed GMass and configured it to send emails over time.

Here’s how to stop GMass from sending emails.

To cancel a particular mail marge campaign

If you have a scheduled mail merge, it will show under the “GMass Scheduled” label. To cancel and prevent it from sending at its scheduled time, just remove the “GMass Scheduled” label from the Draft, and that will prevent GMass from seeing it. The scheduled job will error out and prevent the mail merge campaign from sending.
This also applies to 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, just remove the “GMass Scheduled” label, and further sending will be prevented.

To stop auto follow-ups from sending for a particular campaign

After you’ve launched a campaign with automatic follow-ups, you can edit the auto follow-up settings by finding the campaign under the GMass Auto Followups Label. Open the Draft, click the GMass Settings arrow, and click the Clear all auto follow-ups button. Then hit the GMass main button to save your changes. Also see this detailed guide on canceling auto follow-ups.

To disconnect GMass from your Gmail account and prevent GMass from sending any emails in the future

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

Find GMass listed here, and click the REMOVE button.

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Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Note: GMass no longer offers free accounts due to unsustainable amounts of abuse and resource drain. A free trial is still available for all new GMass users.

Starting Thursday, September 8, 2016, we will be changing the sending limits for free accounts.

Previously, a free account was limited to sending 50 emails at a time, with no restrictions on how many total emails it could send per day. For example, if a free user wanted to send 1,000 emails, the user could split his email list into 20 batches of 50 email addresses each, and send 20 times.

Starting on Thursday September 8, 2016, however, we will be placing an additional restriction on free accounts of 50 sent emails per 24 hours.

We are doing this to curb the abuse of free accounts.

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.

Setting a custom tracking domain on your outreach emails:

improves deliverability, preventing email blocking and spam folder issues
improves the branding of your links
increases your click-through rate
protects you from reputation issues caused by spammers.

If you want to skip the article because you already know you want to set up a tracking domain, here’s how:

Create a sub-domain of your domain, like link.domain.com, and set a CNAME record in your DNS system to point it to x.gmtrack.net.
Test your tracking domain by “pinging” it and ensuring it “pings” x.gmtrack.net. You can use a web-based ping tool.
Go to the GMass tracking settings in the GMass dashboard and enter your tracking domain.
GMass will automatically obtain an SSL certificate for your tracking domain to serve secure tracking links.

Keep on reading if you want to fully understand the importance of a tracking domain.

And/or check out our video…

Custom Tracking Domains: An Overview

I’ve written extensively in the past about the importance of having a dedicated tracking domain for your GMass account. And you can set your tracking domain all on your own. You’ll just need to implement the DNS setup for it first.

What is a custom tracking domain?

A custom tracking domain is your own, unique domain or subdomain which you use exclusively to track opens and clicks in your emails. Custom tracking domains help preserve your sender reputation, increase deliverability, and can even help improve click-through rates.

If you don’t have a tracking domain set up and you’re tracking opens or clicks in your emails, you’re using a shared tracking domain. While we work tirelessly at GMass to keep these shared tracking domains clean and reputable, occasionally a bad actor can slip through the cracks and may use the shared tracking domains in a spam campaign. That can affect your reputation — since your email will now contain the same tracking domain as the spammer.

That scenario won’t happen with a custom tracking domain. The only emails with the custom tracking domain are your own — so no one else can drag down your reputation. Plus, as we’ll cover later in this article, there are plenty of other benefits as well.

Checking your tracking domain

If you’re a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) or Gmail user using GMass for your email marketing campaigns, you may notice that one of several domains, including gmreg.net, gmapp.net, or amazonaws.com is used in your emails’ open tracking, click tracking, and unsubscribe link elements.

That means: If you hover over a tracked link before clicking it, and observe the URL that it points to, you’ll see that it points to amazonaws.com, and then this redirects to the actual destination URL.

You should swap out the default tracking domain for your organization’s own domain. If your domain is mycompany.com, for example, you should set up link.mycompany.com, or x.mycompany.com or news.mycompany.com and use that branded tracking domain with GMass.

There is some technical setup required to make this happen though. Specifically you have to add a DNS record (a CNAME record) with your chosen host aliasing to “x.gmtrack.net.”

See the “How to set up” section below for instructions on how to do that.

What will my recipients see?

The tracking domain is only visible by people receiving your email if they hover/click on any of your tracked links or if they hover/visit your unsubscribe link. The tracking domain is also present in the open-tracking pixel, but this isn’t visible to recipients, unless they take a deep look at your email by viewing its source, but hardly anybody does that.

If you’re a rare user who will be turning both open and click tracking off, and if you’re not placing an unsubscribe link in your emails, then you can ignore this guide, because a tracking domain will never appear in your emails. If you’re like 99% of mailers though, you’re using at least one of those three features, and so a tracking domain is relevant.

What Are the Benefits of Setting Up Your Own Tracking Domain?

There are two major benefits to setting up a branded tracking domain:

1. A branded tracking domain creates a more trustworthy impression to your email recipients. Savvy Internet users hover over links before clicking them, and seeing the domain with which they’re familiar (your organization’s domain) as opposed to GMass’s default tracking domain can go a long way in increasing trust, and ultimately increasing your click-through rate.

The world’s biggest brands use ESPs (Email Service Providers) to send their email marketing campaigns, and they all employ branded tracking domains instead of the default Email Service Provider tracking domain. (Here’s an example I just grabbed from my inbox.)

2. Setting up a branded tracking domain isolates your reputation from the reputation of other GMass users for deliverability purposes.

Meaning, if a spammer slips through the cracks and sends a campaign with GMass… and the spammer’s emails contain the default GMass tracking domain…. and this causes the default tracking domain to be listed by a domain-based spam blacklist… and if your emails contain the same tracking domain… that could affect the deliverability of your emails. If, however, you set up a branded tracking domain, that only your users use, you can protect yourself from being adversely affected by another user’s actions.

Are you a regular Gmail user, not a Google Workspace (G Suite) user?

Even if you’re not a Google Workspace user, you can take advantage of this feature if you manage your own domain and send email campaigns with GMass from a regular Gmail account (your email address is @gmail.com or @googlemail.com).

The default tracking domain used for regular Gmail accounts is “gmreg.net”, but if you manage your own domain, you can assign a branded tracking domain to an individual Gmail account similarly to how you can assign a branded tracking domain to an entire Google Apps domain. Follow the same setup procedures outlined next in this article.

How to Set Up Your Custom Tracking Domain

Decide whether you’ll use a subdomain or register a tracking domain from scratch

The best practice for setting up a tracking domain is to create a subdomain of a domain that has already been in existence for a while, because then it also has reputation associated with it. (A subdomain would be something like “link.yourdomain.com” or “x.yourdomain.com”.)

If you don’t have a domain that you can use for your tracking domain, or if you are unable to modify the DNS for your existing domain, then you can register a new one to use for this purpose.

Here is how you do that:

Choose a domain name registrar. Our favorites are Namecheap and Hover, but feel free to use a more popular service like Register.com or GoDaddy if you’re more familiar with them. In my experience, Hover and Namecheap are simple, have intuitive user interfaces, are inexpensive, and provided good support. I would avoid Gandi.net.
Pick the domain that you want to create as your tracking domain. If your organization is ABC Company, and your existing company domain is abccompany.com, you might pick abccompany.net (if it’s available), or abccompany.us. If the exact name isn’t available, you could pick a name like abccompanyemail.net. You can really pick any domain name that you like. While you can certainly pick a cheaper alternative like a .us domain, I recommend choosing a .net name because it’s shown to have the fewest issues with blacklistings.
You don’t need any supplemental services offered by the domain registrar, like email hosting or a website. You just need the domain. You can choose the WHOIS protection if you want to protect your contact information, and most domain name registrars offer this for free.
Once your name is registered, you are ready to set a CNAME record for your domain. You will find this in the “DNS Settings” of the registrar you’ve chosen. (See our list below for specific instructions for the most popular domain registrars.) It’s easier than it sounds! You’ll need to choose the “host”, which is the word before the domain you just registered. For example, if you choose a host of “view” and you registered abccompany.net, then your tracking domain will be view.abccompany.net. Whatever host you choose, set its CNAME to point to x.gmtrack.net (it used to be track.gmass.co but we’ve changed this now to x.gmtrack.net). After you’re done, your tracking domain will be host.yourdomain, or in this example, view.abccompany.net. You can test the tracking domain by going to it in the web browser, and it should immediately redirect to the GMass homepage or show you a message like “hello.”
Once you know your tracking domain is working, the final step is to apply it to your GMass account.

You can use HSTS domains like .app and .dev

Most email service providers can’t handle HSTS domains, like .app and .dev, for tracking links. These are domains that force the use of HTTPS and don’t allow any requests to be served over HTTP — and most email providers only serve tracking links over HTTP.

GMass is one of the few email service providers — and, we believe, the only cold email platform — that serves tracking links over HTTPS. So feel free to use any of the HSTS domains for your tracking links.

Adding a CNAME record with your domain registrar, web host, or DNS provider

It’s time to create a CNAME record for your chosen host and set it up so the tracking domain aliases to x.gmtrack.net.

If you don’t know what a CNAME record is, you may need to consult your webmaster or domain administrator. Here’s a Google Support page on how to set up a CNAME record.

Here are instructions for setting up a CNAME record at some of the most popular registrars:

How to do this with Cloudflare

Cloudflare is our least favorite DNS provider, because it takes some trickery to set up proper DNS records with them. Cloudflare attempts to rewrite the Domain Name System’s rules, and it usually causes trouble for users who want to create simple DNS records with them.

Cloudflare CNAME — If your CNAME record looks like this, it’s NOT a real CNAME record. The cloud has to be “gray”. Why? Because Cloudflare doesn’t respect DNS rules.

If you set up your CNAME record with Cloudflare, be sure to click the “orange cloud” icon to make it gray. That removes Cloudflare as a proxy and makes your CNAME a true CNAME record. No other DNS provider requires this extra step — only Cloudflare. What’s my favorite DNS provider? We use DNSMadeEasy for all of our domains, including gmass.co.

Test your tracking domain to make sure it’s working

After you’ve set up the new CNAME record, visit your new tracking domain in the browser. You should see a page that looks like this, or maybe one just saying “hello.”

You can also “ping” your tracking domain and see if the x.gmtrack.net IP address is pinged. On Windows, open up a Command Prompt and type “ping your-tracking-domain”. On a Mac, open up Terminal and do the same. I’ve set up link.wordzen.com to be the tracking domain for my own GMass account, for example, so I “ping link.wordzen.com” and see if the ping shows a connection to x.gmtrack.net:

In this case, I’ve set up the tracking domain “track.wordzen.com.” To test my DNS record, I ping track.wordzen.com and look for a successful connection to x.gmtrack.net.

If it’s not working yet, try giving it a few hours. DNS records like CNAME can sometimes take a few hours (even up to eight hours) to propagate.

After you’ve completed the DNS setup, you must submit your tracking domain to GMass.

Set your dedicated tracking domain in GMass

Set your tracking domain in the GMass dashboard.

Just go to this direct tracking domain link. Login if you’re not already logged in, and you’ll be taken to the Tracking section.

Note: For instant approval, your tracking domain must either be new to the system or contain the domain of your Google Workspace email address. Meaning, if you are [email protected], your tracking domain should be something like link.abcwidgets.com. If your email address domain and your tracking domain don’t match and the tracking domain has already been assigned to at least one other user, your request will be sent for approval to users who are already assigned to that tracking domain. One of those users must then approve your request.

If you want to clear your custom tracking domain so your mailings revert to the system shared tracking domain, use the “clear” option next to the form where your tracking domain is set.

After you’ve set up your tracking domain, GMass will start the process of acquiring an SSL certificate, so your links are served securely. You’ll get an email once everything is set up. (In my test, it took seven minutes from inputting my custom tracking domain to getting the email.)

We monitor blacklists for you

Now that your custom tracking domain is set up, there’s really nothing else you have to do. GMass will automatically use that domain for your open tracking pixel, your tracked links, and your unsubscribe link.

And GMass will also watch for blacklists.

Domains used in bulk email sometimes end up on domain blacklists, and as soon as you set your custom tracking domain with GMass, we add it to our monitoring system. GMass checks blacklists for our users’ tracking domains every few hours. Specifically, we check the URIBL, SURBL, and Spamhaus DBL lists for your tracking domain and receive a notification within hours if your tracking domain is listed. We will then manually reach out to you with some recommended measures. See our comprehensive guide on domain blacklists to learn more.

Additionally, if you haven’t set up a custom tracking domain, in order to prevent abuse of our default tracking domains, we check every URL in your campaign against the SURBL and Spamhaus DBL. Why do we do this? Sometimes phishers and scammers attempt to mask a known phishing domain by using the click-tracking feature of an email service provider like GMass, which replaces the phishing domain with the tracking domain and making the link look legitimate.

This is abusive, so we monitor our users to ensure that domains used in click-tracked links are not on blacklists. If our systems detect you have a domain in your email that’s on a blacklist, we’ll reach out to you. We are aware that sometimes domains appear on blacklists that aren’t involved in spam.

Note to Users Who Were Part of GMass’s Old Tracking Domain Setup

A while back, we sunsetted our program where we provide dedicated tracking domains to users who are unable to set one up based on their own domain. We decided to stop doing this because:

The logistics of managing thousands of domains has become very difficult. Registering them and keeping track of renewals is time consuming.
The renewal costs for domains has become cost-prohibitive. Typically we chose inexpensive domain extensions like .us, .info, and .website, where we’d be able to register a domain for a user for as little as $0.88 USD, but while registration is inexpensive, the renewal in the subsequent year is often $8 USD or more. Since we’ve never charged users for a dedicated tracking domain, the renewal cost is too much to bear.
While using a dedicated tracking domain is still important to protect your reputation from that of all other GMass users and achieve high deliverability, we think that it’s much easier, and better for your reputation, if you set this up based on your own domain or register a new one from scratch.

Along with no longer registering domains for users, we will also be letting existing tracking domains that were provided by us to our users, to expire. In order to coordinate a seamless transition back to the GMass shared tracking domains, and so open and click tracking continues to work seamlessly for your email campaigns, we will be removing the dedicated tracking domain assignment from your accounts approximately one month BEFORE the domain expires, so that the lag time between when the most recent campaign with the tracking domain was sent and when the domain expires is enough that it won’t affect people clicking on links.

We Can Set Up a Custom Tracking Domain For You

If you’re already a paying subscriber, for a flat fee of $50, our support reps will set this up for you so you don’t need to busy yourself with the technical details. Just fill out this form to get started.

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.

Gmail officially claims that with a regular Gmail account you can send 500 emails/day and with a G Suite account you can send 2,000 emails/day. In fact, I’ve even claimed that with GMass, if you’re a Google Workspace (formerly called G Suite) user, you can send a 10,000 recipient campaign, where GMass will evenly distribute the campaign at 2,000 emails/day for 5 consecutive days.

So if you’re using GMass, you should be able to send 60,000 emails/month (2,000/day x 30 days in a month) from a single Google Workspace account, right? As it turns out, that usually isn’t the case.

In working with over 700,000 accounts in our lifetime, we’ve noticed that Google often throttles the number of emails a particular account can send based on a variety of factors, including:

How old the particular Gmail or Google apps account is (the older, the better)
How many conversations exist in the account (may existing conversations are better)
Whether the account has sent mass emails before (if it has, then you’re better off)
The content of the mass emails (non-spammy content)
The bounce rate of the overall account (the lower the better)

We don’t have exact rules on how Google decides how many emails an account can send at a particular time, but here’s what we’ve observed:

A new Gmail account (ending in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com) with no history has very limited sending ability. Sometimes you are limited to 10 emails right when the account is created.
A new Google Workspace account, where the organization itself is new to Google Workspace, also has very limited sending ability.
A new Google Workspace account, where the organization has a history with Google Workspace, can send near the 2,000 emails/day limit almost right away

Campaign Data From the Last 24 Hours

Have a look at some live campaign stats from the last 24 hours. This data is updated daily.

Gmail Campaign Data for Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Campaigns Sent from Gmail Accounts:	5,579
Campaigns That Hit Limits Prematurely:	213
Campaigns That Hit Limits Prematurely that were Rerouted over SMTP:	0

G Suite Campaign Data for Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Campaigns Sent from G Suite Accounts:	23,949
Campaigns That Hit Limits Prematurely:	981
Campaigns That Hit Limits Prematurely that were Rerouted over SMTP:	0

7 ways we break your limits

A brief history of how we’ve overcome Gmail’s limits

For a long time, the biggest frustration amongst GMass users was hitting Gmail’s sending limits and receiving a flurry of “You have reached a limit for sending mail” bounce messages in the Inbox. To address this, we built the distributed scheduling feature, where you can send large campaigns of 10,000 recipients or more, and GMass will spread it evenly over a number of days, so as to not exceed your daily sending quota.

This technique proved to have its limitations, however, because Gmail doesn’t always allow you to send your full account limits.

To further address this, GMass added the option of being able to set an outside SMTP server with your account, such that you could still use GMass and Gmail to launch your email campaigns, but the emails would actually be sent via a third party sending service rather than by Gmail directly. From the user’s standpoint, however, everything would still look and feel the same: the emails would still show up in your Sent Mail folder, and everything from opens and clicks to bounces and replies would still be tracked.

For our non tech-savvy users, however, signing up for a third party SMTP service and connecting it to GMass was frustrating and difficult. To address that frustration, we made it possible for users to use our internal SendGrid account. We created an application process for “good” senders where we would connect their GMass account for them to our internal SendGrid account, so the user could skip the technical details and just send.

Still though, this requires “work” on behalf of the user, because the user has to

Apply to use our SMTP server.
Wait for approval from us.
Remember to choose the “SendGrid” option instead of the “Gmail” option in the GMass Settings box.

We’ve built seven ways to help you overcome sending limits.

The Seven Ways

There are seven ways we can help you get around the gmail.com limits of 500/day and the Google Workspace limits of 2,000/day.

1. Distribution over multiple days
  If your campaign hits its limits and never sends over SMTP, we will simply distribute the email volume over multiple days until all emails are sent. This is the simplest way to circumvent the limits.
2. Accounts with high GMass reputations
  If your account has a high reputation with us, meaning it’s long-standing and your deliverability metrics are good, we might “push” the remainder of your campaign through our internal SMTP server (SendGrid) if you hit your account’s limits. For example, if you’re sending a 5,000 person campaign, and your account sends the maximum of 2,000/day, after the first day when 2,000 emails are sent natively through Gmail, our algorithm might select your campaign to send the remaining 3,000 emails instantly over our SMTP server. (You also have the power to turn this re-routing off.)
  
  The notification you’ll get if your campaign is automatically re-routed through our SMTP server.
  
  Additionally, if your campaign hits your Gmail limits earlier than expected and starts generating bounces, as is often the case with new Gmail accounts with little history with Google, we might also select your campaign to be pushed through our internal SMTP server.
3. Accounts connected to their own SMTP servers
  You can connect your own SMTP server to your GMass account, and then using your Gmail account with the GMass Chrome extension, you can send virtually unlimited emails this way, using the Gmail interface. This feature allows you to send an unlimited number of emails from your Gmail account.If you connect an SMTP server to your account, you can then choose which campaigns are sent natively vs which are sent via the SMTP server. You can also set your account so that when you send natively over Gmail, if you hit a limit, the remainder get rerouted to the SMTP server you connected.
4. Campaigns can be hand selected to be rerouted
  If you don’t connect an SMTP server and your campaign hits its limits and it’s not automatically selected by our algorithm to push the remainder over SMTP, our support personnel might hand pick your campaign to finish sending over SMTP if it’s of a non-commercial nature.
  
  The notification you’ll get if our support staff manually re-routes your campaign over SMTP.
5. Request that your campaign be rerouted over SMTP (new as of February 2021)
  If your campaign hits a sending limit, you can click a link to request that our staff review your campaign to see if it’s eligible to be pushed out over one of our internal SMTP providers like SendGrid or Mailgun.
  
  When you hit a Gmail limit, you’ll have the option to request that we push the remainder of your campaign out over an SMTP provider.
6. Break Gmail’s limits naturally
  Finally, sometimes you can break your own account limits just by trying. The 500/day and 2,000/day for Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, respectively, doesn’t always hold true. Sometimes Google will give you more than the standard limits. If your campaign is close to finishing but GMass stops it from finishing because of the limit, we’ll also give you a link to click to ignore Gmail’s limit and send it anyway, naturally through your Gmail account, and not through an external SMTP server. For example, if you’re a Google Workspace user and you send a campaign to 2,100 people, and we stop sending at 2,000 to respect your limits, you can try sending the remaining 100 right now. You can also choose to permanently ignore Gmail’s limits and in that case, for all of your campaigns, we’ll never stop them when they hit limits, unless we detect that Google is bouncing your emails because of the this.
  
  You notification you get when your campaign hits the limits. You’ll get a link to click to ignore the limits and keep sending.
7. Inbox rotation with GMass MultiSend
  With GMass MultiSend, GMass can automatically distribute your campaign across multiple Gmail/Google Workspace accounts. There’s really no limit on how many additional accounts you can connect to your paid GMass account, so you could distribute a gigantic campaign across tons of email addresses to keep your sending volume reasonable on each one.

Configure your settings for Gmail limits

In the Dashboard, you’ll find a section of the Settings called “Gmail Limits”.

Ignore Gmail limit: When enabled, GMass won’t stop your campaign at 500 emails/day (@gmail.com accounts) or 2,000 emails/day (Google Workspace accounts). If you haven’t specified a set number of emails to send per day in your campaign-level settings, meaning you want the maximum sent, GMass will keep sending natively through Gmail, unless it encounters “You have reached a limit” bounce at which point it will stop. Note that this is an account-level setting and applies to all campaigns. You can also leave this unchecked and decide to ignore Gmail limits only on certain campaigns.

Never reroute to the GMass SMTP server: When enabled, GMass will never reroute your campaign to our internal SMTP server (SendGrid) even if you bump up against your sending limits and you qualify to use our SMTP server. Instead we’ll simply push your campaign out 24 hours into the future when your account limits reset.

Reroute to my SMTP server: This setting only applies if you’ve connected an SMTP server to your GMass account. When enabled, if you send a campaign natively through Gmail instead of your SMTP server, and then you hit a sending limit, the remaining emails will be sent over your own SMTP server. A “sending limit” is defined as either a) starting to receive “You have reached a limit” bounces from Gmail or b) sending what your account naturally allows (500/day for Gmail or 2,000/day for Google Workspace). Note that this is an account-level setting and applies to all campaigns. You can also leave this unchecked and decide to reroute only certain campaigns to your SMTP server.

Pause campaign indefinitely if bouncing: If your campaign starts bouncing with over-limit bounces from Gmail, this setting will force the campaign to pause and stay paused until you manually resume it. This setting will prevent GMass from trying to send it again a few hours later.

Force multi-day campaigns to start at same time: Normally, campaigns that run into sending limits would be staggered so that a full 24 hour of space is provided between sends, in order to reset the sending quota. But if the goal is to send batches of emails at the same start time very day, this setting will override the default behavior. For more details, see the article on timing.

FAQ on rerouting emails to our SMTP server

What’s the secret formula to getting pushed through SendGrid?

We have a sophisticated and accurate way of determining whether a campaign is opt-in and should be rerouted through SendGrid.

What about the deliverability advantage of Gmail?

When GMass automatically pushes a campaign via SendGrid rather than Gmail, the email is no longer going through Gmail’s high deliverability servers, but our recent data shows that the IP of the sending server is less relevant than it used to be for email deliverability purposes.

Inbox placement has more to do with the actual sender, the domain’s reputation, and the content of the email, rather than the sending IP. Meaning, we’ve been noticing that if half of a 5,000 recipient campaign sends through Gmail, and the other half sends through SendGrid, the open rates for each batch of 2,500 are around the same.

However, to ensure that we’re not compromising your campaign’s deliverability by re-routing it through SendGrid, we’ll show you your campaign’s open rates, broken out into TWO groups — the chunk of emails sent natively via Gmail, and the the batch sent via SendGrid.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see in a campaign report:

This sample campaign’s open rate is virtually the same between the portion sent via Gmail and the portion sent via a third party SMTP server.

I don’t want my email campaigns automatically pushed to SendGrid. How do I stop it?

You can set this in your Settings, and we’ll set your account to never use this new capability.

What happens when you try to send but you are over limit?

Using GMass, you’ll notice that Gmail will start bouncing the emails and the bounce notification will look like this:

This is the Bounce you’ll see if GMass sends an email when your account is over limit.

If you are in the Gmail interface, and you try to send a regular email with the regular blue Send button, you’ll be stopped with a popup that looks like this:

This is the error you’ll get if you try to send an email with the regular Gmail Send button when your account is over limit.

What does GMass do when it detects that your account is over limit?

GMass looks for bounce notifications like the one shown above to determine if your account is over limit. In fact, while it’s sending your campaign, it’s also simultaneously monitoring for these bounces. If the bounces start to appear, and you are technically under the 500 or 2,000 limit, and your campaign isn’t being rerouted over an SMTP service, then GMass pauses your campaign for a few hours and tries to continue sending later. Learn more about timing.

Does GMass resend the emails that bounce due to limits?

Yes, GMass automatically resend the emails that have bounced with an over-limit message. In case this doesn’t work though, you can easily resend these emails after you determine that your account has more sending ability.

Special Privilege for Google Workspace Users

If you have a Workspace account, and you’ve reached your limit and are unable to send emails, you have the option of having your Workspace administrator “reset” your account. This is done through the Google Workspace Admin console. By resetting your account, your daily quota is immediately reset. This option, however, can only be used 5 times per year per account, so use this sparingly…only in situations where you’ve hit your limit and you absolutely need to send more email, whether it’s through GMass or person-to-person email with the regular Send button.

Does subscribing to GMass improve my ability to send?

Subscribing to GMass allows you to send more than 50 emails/day with GMass, but it doesn’t have any impact on your account’s reputation with Google and your sending limits with Google. It only has bearing on what you can do with GMass. If Google allows your G Suite account the full 2,000 emails/day, but you’re using a free GMass account, then you’re still limited to sending 50 emails/day with GMass. You could still, however, send 2,000 individual emails with the regular Gmail Send button though. Whether you have a free or a paid GMass account, your overall sending limit per day is the same and is determined by Gmail, not by GMass.

How many emails can I natively send with GMass and Gmail?

If you have a Gmail account with an excellent reputation, you’ll usually get your 500 email limit for the first 24 hours but only a subset of that for the second 24-hour period. Meaning, if you send 750 emails, where GMass sends the first batch of 450 now (so you have a buffer of 50), and the remaining 300 24 hours later, that usually works. Avoid sending 900 though, because then you would need your full sending ability during the second 24-hour period.

If you have a G Suite account with an excellent reputation, you’ll usually get the full 2,000 email limit for the first 24 hours but only a subset of that for the second 24-hour period. So, you can probably send 3,500 emails, where 1,950 go out the first day, and the remaining go out on the second day, but if you were to send 4,000 emails, you might get some bounces on the second day.

Breaking Gmail’s sending limits

We offer you the capability to “break” Gmail’s sending limits and send an unlimited number of emails through your Gmail account. It works by connecting your account to a third-party SMTP service like SendGrid. You still launch your email outreach campaigns from Gmail, just like normal, but your emails bypass Google’s servers and are sent via the third-party SMTP service instead. See the “six different ways” section above to learn how to circumvent limits.

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Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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We’ve had several users in the last few days report that emails they are sending with GMass to their own Gmail addresses are ending up in the Spam folder or even worse, are flagged as being as a scam.

Why is this happening?

In the email sending industry, it’s generally accepted that Google employs the most sophisticated spam filtering algorithm out of any email provider. With GMass, when you send emails with open and click tracking, the domain that gets inserted into your emails is by default the same domain that gets inserted when everyone else sends as well. Despite GMass being an actively monitored system, occasionally a spammer slips through our detection, and if Google flags that domain, then this results in emails ending up in Spam or being flagged as a scam.

What is this domain you are talking about? Do you mean the domain in my email address?

No, that’s separate. We are referring to a domain that gets inserted into the body of your email in order to make open and click tracking work. This is what we call a “tracking domain”. Typically it is something like gmss10.net. Here’s an example:

How do I separate my legitimate emails from the spammers’ email?

You need a dedicated tracking domain for your GMass email campaigns. If you implement this, and you send email that people want, you essentially guarantee yourself 100% deliverability. If you don’t, you are risking the chance of getting poor Inbox deliverability.

I want a dedicated tracking domain. What’s my next step?

If you are able to add a DNS record for your domain…

You can easily set up a branded tracking domain for your GMass accounts that is based on your OWN domain name. Just add a CNAME record for the tracking domain you choose (track.abcwidgets.com for example) to point to “x.gmtrack.net”. Detailed setup instructions here.

If you can’t add a DNS record to your existing domain…

If you don’t know how to manage DNS records or don’t have access to do so, you can register a tracking domain from scratch specifically for use with GMass.

Which is better: setting up a dedicated tracking domain based on my own domain, or having you provide one to me?

If you know how to manage your domain’s DNS settings, as mentioned in the prior question, it is preferable that you set up a tracking domain based on your own domain. The “hover effect” is optimized here — when your recipients hover over a link in your email campaign, and notice where it points before they click, they are more likely to click if they recognize your domain. The GMass-provided dedicated tracking domains will never look as polished as your own, but it’s simply a matter of cosmetics. The 100% deliverability is achieved either way.

Why do you let spammers use GMass?

GMass by design is an unmonitored system. I chose to do it that way because Google already shuts down spammer accounts for us, so there’s really no need for GMass to have its own monitoring in place. That said, even Gmail’s spam and abuse detection isn’t perfect. So some spam does still get sent by Gmail accounts, and when that happens, domains included in those spam messages get flagged, including the shared tracking domain that GMass uses to implement open and click tracking.

If the shared tracking domain gets flagged, can’t you just switch it out for a different one?

Yes, we do switch out the shared tracking domain periodically, but inevitably, spammers will cause the new shared tracking domain to get flagged, causing the issue to surface again.

Is this a new issue for GMass, or has this been happening for a while?

This is a relatively new issue. In the past, even though the shared tracking domain would get flagged, emails would bounce with a block notification. We can then detect that and assign a dedicated tracking domain to the affected user to eliminate the issue going forward. Now, however, we are noticing emails are still getting delivered, but just going to Spam. That wasn’t happening before.

Can you detect if my emails are being flagged?

In some cases we can, and in some we can’t. If your email is flat out blocked by a recipient, then a bounce is generated. GMass then detects the block and reports it to you under the GMass Reports folder. We also send a daily report to those users experiencing a lot of blocking encouraging to get a dedicated tracking domain. However, in cases where the email isn’t outright rejected, but is instead routed to the Spam folder or is flagged as a scam, we have no way of knowing this, so we can’t detect it and then inform you. That’s why it’s best to be proactive and get a dedicated tracking domain even if you’re not having delivery issues.

If I turn off open and click tracking, will that solve the issue?

Yes, you can also achieve 100% perfect deliverability by turning off open and click tracking, but you really don’t have to if you go through the simple process of setting up a dedicated tracking domain. Then you get the best of both worlds: perfect deliverability and detailed analytics.

This is too hard. I don’t understand. Can you just set this up for me?

Yes, just tell me that’s what you want. If you’re unable to create a dedicated tracking domain based on your own domain, you can register a new one from scratch.

If you can easily set this up for me, why don’t you just do it for every GMass user?

Because that would be really expensive and time consuming. Over 45,000 accounts have signed up for GMass, and it’s only been available for 11 months. If we had to register 45,000 domains, one for each user, we’d be incurring huge expenses. If we just do it for the people that ask, it’s much more manageable.

I sent some test emails with GMass and they landed in Spam, and then I used a different service, and they went to the Inbox. Doesn’t that mean that people are blocking GMass?

No. People are blocking the shared tracking domain that GMass uses, which is why its advantageous for each legitimate GMass user to use their own dedicated tracking domain, one that nobody else uses. That way, you can never get mixed up with a spammer’s emails, and your emails will sail through to the Inbox. The reason it may not happen with another provider, is because the other provider hasn’t been a free service, and therefore detracts spammers rather than attracts spammers.

What about GMass’s IP addresses? Do they have a good reputation?

No email is actually sent from GMass’s IP addresses, so GMass IPs are irrelevant. All email is sent from our users’ own Gmail accounts, meaning the emails are sent from Gmail’s IP addresses, and Gmail’s IP addresses have the best email sending reputation in the world.

I’m an experienced email marketer and have used other platforms prior to GMass and never had this issue. Why does GMass have this issue?

Because GMass has been a long-time free and unmonitored system. No other email marketing system in the world is free and would dare be unmonitored. Every service from MailChimp to Hubspot has systems in place to prevent spammers from sending email. GMass does not. This was decided intentionally, because GMass is a unique service in that it’s built on top of Gmail rather than a standalone service.

I find it hard to believe that if I take this one step, I can achieve 100% perfect deliverability. Are you being serious?

Absolutely. If you have a dedicated tracking domain and you send with GMass, you will achieve 100% deliverability (except for invalid addresses that legitimately bounce).

Isn’t GMass about to start charging for services? Will that change anything?

Yes, on Monday, August 15, when GMass places limits on free accounts can do, this issue will be substantially mitigated. However, it is still a best practice to set up your own dedicated tracking domain.

So other than getting a dedicated tracking domain, do I need to do anything else to ensure my email goes to the Inbox?

As a best practice, you should set up SPF if you’re a Google Apps user. If you have just a regular @gmail.com or @googlemail.com account, you don’t have to do anything.

I have received confirmation from you that my dedicated tracking domain is in place. How do I use it?

Don’t do anything differently — just send as you normally would. The dedicated tracking domain will be inserted automatically into your emails.

Now that my dedicated tracking domain is in place how can I resend my email campaign to people that didn’t get it before?

GMass makes it easy to resend your campaign to people that blocked your campaign previously. Just follow these steps.

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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First, here’s the GMass Pricing page where you can subscribe.

Free Trial versus Paid

Q: Do I have to upgrade to a paid account? Can I just keep using my free trial?

A: Free trials last for seven days and are limited to sending 50 email messages per day. All other features work during the free trial.

Q: What features won’t work with a free trial?

A: All features work with a free trial. The only restriction with free trials is that you can’t send to more than 50 email addresses in a 24-hour period. You also can’t hook up a SMTP server to break Gmail’s limits because, again, 50 emails.

Q: I paid for GMass but the GMass buttons aren’t showing up. Why not?

A: Whether you have a free trial or paid account does not determine whether the GMass buttons show up. In fact, you don’t even need to have a GMass account at all in order for the buttons to show up. As long as you have the GMass Chrome extension installed, the buttons should show up, irrespective of what kind of account you have. If the GMass buttons are not showing up and you do have the extension installed see the extension troubleshooter.

Q: I’m using the free trial, and I haven’t yet sent 50 emails today, but it’s still telling me I have to upgrade. Why?

A: The count of emails is done on a rolling 24-hour basis, so with a free trial, anytime you send with the GMass button, a count is done of all the emails sent in the prior 24 hours. This includes any test emails, and includes emails sent to the Spam Solver, if you’ve used that (the Spam Solver generates about 20 sent emails). Additionally, let’s say your campaign contains 100 total addresses and you specify a schedule of sending them at 20 emails/day. While technically you’d still be under 50 emails/day, you’ll still be prompted to upgrade because the free account can’t recognize that the 100 addresses are being spread out — it only sees that you’re trying to send to 100 emails right now.

Gmail versus Google Workspace

Q: How do I know whether I have a Gmail or a Google Workspace account?

A: If your Gmail account ends in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com you have a Gmail account. If your Gmail account ends in your own domain, like @abcwidgets.com, for example, then you have a Google Workspace account.

Q: I manage multiple Gmail accounts, and want to use GMass with all of them. Do I get a discount?

A: Yes, you can buy a Team Plan and then add accounts to your team, and save significantly on the per-user cost.

Q: I sometimes get bounces from Gmail when I try to send that say I’m over my limit. Will subscribing to a paid plan fix that?

A: No. If Gmail is bouncing your emails because you’re over limit, subscribing won’t have any effect on that. Subscribing will allow you to send more than 50 emails in a day, but if Gmail is already limiting your sends, subscribing to GMass can’t fix that. What can help with that is the GMass unlimited sending option, which allows you to send your emails through an external SMTP server. If you’re on the GMass Professional plan, you can also use MultiSend to distribute your campaign across multiple accounts.

The Minimal plan and the GMass footer

Q: What happened to the Minimal plan? It’s no longer on the Pricing page.

A: On December 9, 2020, we removed the Minimal plan. We did this for several reasons.

1. The Minimal plan was a discounted plan that included a GMass-branded footer on the bottom of emails. The footer often frustrated users that signed up for the Minimal plan but didn’t realize that the footer would be appended to their emails. Despite our making it clear in several places that a footer would appear, users were still frustrated, and we wanted to eliminate that frustration.

2. The idea behind the footer was to offer a discount in exchange for promoting GMass to your recipients via the footer. We realized that the GMass footer has resulted in very few sales in the 4 years of offering the Minimal plan.

3. Lately, the reputation of the domain that we used in the footer (gmass.io) had dropped, likely due to one or a few customers on the Minimal plan. Because we can’t control the content of all our users’ emails, placing a branded footer at the bottom of one group of customers’ emails risks the deliverability of all the customers in that group, because one spammer has the ability to lower the reputation of that domain and therefore the deliverability of emails for everyone.

Subscribing, Canceling and Upgrading

Q: How do I subscribe to a paid account?

A: First make sure you’ve installed GMass and connected GMass to your Gmail account. Then go to https://www.gmass.co/pricing, choose a plan, and enter your payment information.

Q: What email address should I use in the payment form?

A: You should use the email address that is the address of the Gmail/Google Workspace account with which you’d like to use GMass.

Q: I accidentally subscribed the wrong account. Can I transfer my subscription to a different Gmail account?

Yes, if both accounts are connected to GMass, and if the transfer-from account is a paid account and the transfer-to account is a free account. If these conditions apply, follow these instructions to transfer your subscription.

Q: How do I upgrade from one level to the next?

A: See these instructions to easily upgrade or downgrade GMass plans.

Q: How do I cancel my paid account?

A: Follow these simple instructions to cancel your GMass subscription.

Q: My Gmail account has become disabled. Therefore I can’t log in to follow the cancellation procedures. How do I cancel?

A: You can still cancel your subscription yourself. See the cancellation instructions. They explain how to cancel even if you’ve lost access to your account.

Q: I only need to send an email once a quarter. Can I subscribe, then send, then cancel?

A: Yes, you can. You will have to pay for the whole month though, but feel free to subscribe during just the months when you need to send.

Q: Can I use one single subscription with multiple Gmail accounts?

A: No, you must purchase a GMass subscription for each Gmail account you want to send large campaigns from. If, however, you have different From alias addresses configured in your single Gmail account, then you only need one GMass subscription and can still send “from” each From address configured in your Gmail account. Also, if you’re using MultiSend for inbox rotation/distributed campaigns, you only need one subscription — your additional sending accounts don’t need their own subscriptions.

Q: I’m getting billed for a GMass subscription, but I don’t know which account is subscribed, so I can’t cancel it. What do I do?

A: First, try figuring out which account is subscribed yourself. 1) Click the GMass Settings arrow in a Compose window, and looking in the upper right corner for your account status. If that account is subscribed, it will say your plan like “Standard”, “Premium”, or “Professional” in the lower right corner. 2) You can also determine which account is subscribed by searching your email like this:

subject:"gmass billing"

If you still can’t figure it out, provide the last 4 digits of your credit card and some other identifying information to our Support team.

Q: I accidentally subscribed when I didn’t mean to. Can I get a refund?

A: You can request a refund, and if your account meets certain criteria, the refund will be granted automatically by your request.

Payment Methods

Q: What payment methods do you accept?

A: GMass accepts credit card and PayPal. We used to accept Bitcoin, but then our primary payment processor, Stripe, deprecated its support for Bitcoin, so for now, we are not accepting Bitcoin.

Q: What will I see on my credit card?

A: The charge will say “GMASS”.

Q: Do you accept PayPal?

A: Yes, if you can’t pay by credit card, you may pay with PayPal. See our PayPal subscription page to subscribe with PayPal. There are some limitations when subscribing with PayPal. You can’t switch plans between Minimal, Standard, and Premium easily. To change plans, you must cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe. Also, you can’t manage your subscription inside the GMass dashboard. You can only manage your subscription inside PayPal.

Q: How can I change the credit card associated with my account?

A: Follow these instructions to change your credit card.

Discounts

Q: Do you have a discount for .org and .edu accounts?

A: Yes, if you are a Google Workspace user with a .org or .edu domain, you will enjoy 15% off the published prices automatically.

Q: I’m a .org or a .edu user. I see that you offer a 15% discount, but when I go to subscribe, the price shown doesn’t reflect a 15% discount. Why not?

A: The discount is actually calculated after you subscribe and can’t be shown at the time you subscribe and enter your credit card. But we promise that a 15% discount will be applied to your initial payment and all recurring charges.

Q: I’m a non-profit but my domain is not a .edu or .org domain. Can I still get the discount?

A: Unfortunately the discount is automatic and only applies to .org and .edu domains. We understand that you may be a non-profit running under a .com or other domain, but in the interest of keeping GMass as automated of a system as possible, we can’t apply this discount to you in this scenario. We still love you and hope you’ll choose to subscribe. GMass is a low-cost service, and we sincerely hope the lack of discount in this scenario doesn’t sway your decision to subscribe.

Billing Questions

Q: On what date will I be billed?

A: You are billed on the monthly or annual anniversary of the date you subscribed.

Q: How can I see my GMass invoices?

A: Follow these instructions to retrieve your GMass invoices.

Q: I want to send a 1,000 person campaign but don’t want to upgrade to a paid account. Can I just use my free trial to send to 50 people 20 times?

A: Sorry, free accounts are limited to sending 50 emails per rolling 24 hours.

Q: What happens if I try to send a large campaign from a free trial?

A: The send will fail and you’ll get a message in the yellow bar at the top of your Gmail account indicating that the send failed. You’ll also then be given the option to upgrade to a paid account.

Q: What happens if I try to configure auto follow-ups from an account without auto follow-up privileges?

Team Plans

Q: If I purchase a Team account, what plan do my individual users get subscribed to?

A: All team plans are for the highest level, Professional account. So all members of your team will have a Professional account.

Q: Who has the authority to buy a team plan for a Google Workspace domain?

A: Anyone can buy a team plan and then add any accounts of any domain to that plan. Accounts under a team plan do not need to be on the same domain.

Q: How do I choose which users are part of my Team Plan?

A: You can view, add, and delete team members by following the instructions here for Team Plan management.

Q: Can I purchase a team plan at lower plan levels?

A: No, Team Plans are all at the highest, Professional level. However, the per-user cost is significantly discounted from the regular Professional price.

Q: What features are available to Team Plan members?

A: Team plans get access to features that make collaborating around email campaigns easier. See this article about team features.

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.