We’ve seen bounces like this for both regular Gmail users and Google Apps users using GMass. The error is a non-standard bounce message that is specific to sending via the Google platform. What causes the error? Nobody is certain for sure, but the Internet speculates that it’s either one of the following:
The remote server is rejecting the email due to an SPF failure. This is applicable to Google Apps users that are sending from their own organization’s domain, not from gmail.com or googlemail.com.
The remote server is rejecting the email because Gmail’s sending IP is blacklisted, but Gmail doesn’t want the end user to know that’s the reason for the fail, so this generic message is delivered instead.
The SPF record for wordzen.com breaks the rules by requiring too many DNS lookups.
In the case of wordzen.com’s SPF record, the record includes permission for Google’s servers to send email for wordzen.com, but here’s an example of a domain of a GMass user where SPF doesn’t include Google’s servers at all:
If you still see this bounce notification after ensuring correct SPF settings, or if you’re not a Google Apps user, it could be issue #2 at play.
How is GMass handling these bounces?
Since GMass categories all bounces and replies for you, and builds an internal Bounce List for your account in order to suppress future mailings to bounced addresses, we’ve added these bounces to our “Bounce Exception” list, meaning we won’t count addresses that bounce with this message as a true bounce. That means that future attempts to send to these addresses will still work.
We’ve also deleted all bounces that were on your account’s Bounce List in the past because of this issue.
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Automated email follow-ups in Gmail
The original email plus the automatic follow-ups that were sent one and five days later.
Overview:
Learn how to set automatic follow-up email campaigns to be sent after an email campaign is sent, to increase your response rates dramatically. Reminders will be sent to your recipients in stages until you get a reply (or an open or click). An essential feature for cold emailers!
An example: You send an email campaign to 100 warm leads from a trade show offering to set up a demo of your product. When you send that campaign, you set it so that two days later, a reminder is sent to anyone that hasn’t replied. Three days after that, another reminder is sent, and a few days after that, a final email is sent asking for a reply.
Gmail auto follow up using GMass
It’s easy to set up a Gmail auto follow-up using GMass, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve created. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want to be sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send.
A demonstration of how to set automated follow-ups.
Testing your email sequence before you send it
You can easily test your sequence and see exactly what it will look like in the Inbox before you send.
Important points to know
You can use this feature for both mass emails and individual emails. If you’ve been using another Gmail tool, like Rebump, for follow-ups to your individual personal emails, you can eliminate that tool and use GMass instead to create automatic follow-ups.
You can choose behavior associated with the automatic follow-up. You can have the follow-ups sent to people who didn’t reply, or people who didn’t open, orpeople who didn’t click, or everyone (ALL). If you choose “Didn’t Open” as your follow-up action, fewer follow-ups will be sent because you will almost always have more Opens than you will Replies. If you choose “Didn’t Reply” as your action, more follow-ups will be sent because “Didn’t Reply” includes unread emails. Typically, cold emailers are seeking a reply to their campaign, so cold emailers use the “No Reply” setting most often.
Related to the behavior setting explained above, if you choose ALL, the auto follow-up stage will go to everyone in the original campaign, regardless of whether they replied, opened, or took any other action in response to your email. Additionally, whether the follow-up message goes out as a stand-alone email or as a message threaded to the same conversation as your original campaign depends on whether you set the content using the plain text box or choose a campaign from the drop-down list. If you type text in the box, then the email goes out threaded to the same email conversation you’ve already started with the prospect. If you choose a campaign from the drop-down, the subsequent emails are sent as stand-alone messages, meaning even the Subject set in that template will be seen by your recipient. When you choose a campaign from the drop-down menu, the sequence of emails goes out like a drip campaign, as if you wanted to send a training or introductory sequence of emails to your audience.
Use the power of this feature sparingly. You likely don’t want to configure automated follow-up emails with every campaign you send. This will cause your recipients to get a lot of emails from you, so you should only use this feature to send a follow-up reminder when you genuinely want a reply.
If you want your automated follow-up emails to include more than just plain text, you can add rich text the message to your follow-up emails. This is done by creating the auto follow-up message in the Gmail Compose window and saving it to your account, and then selecting “Send custom message…” and choosing the message from the drop-down menu. (You can also edit those messages.) You’ll also need to use this option if you want click tracking, as click tracking requires HTML.
You can also personalize your auto follow-up emails with personalization variables, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can use personalization tags inside an auto follow-up message. Either type them manually or choose them from the Personalization drop-down menu for easy pasting.
After you’ve launched a campaign with automatic follow-ups, you can edit or cancel the auto follow-up settings. Here you can also add auto follow-ups to a campaign after the fact if you forgot to do so when you originally sent it, but be careful. Changing the settings of an already-sent campaign of scheduled emails can trigger the sending of an immediate batch of reminder emails if you’re not careful with the settings. If you change your mind and now wish to prevent auto follow-ups from being sent, just set the “Days” to 0 for any particular Stage.
You can use this feature with or without Google Sheets. If you use it with Google Sheets, you can personalize your emails based on much more than just First and Last Name, which elevates your follow-up content from being an obvious canned response.
If you’re setting auto follow-ups based on replies, you can toggle a domain-match setting such that if anybody at a domain responds, all future follow-ups to everybody at the same domain will stop. See the auto follow-up domain match setting doc for more information.
Every campaign you send gets assigned a number called a Campaign ID. This ID is unique to your campaign and helps us identify your campaign if there are any issues. When we collect statistics on your campaigns, like numbers of opens and clicks, these are tied to your campaign by its unique ID. However, it’s important to know that each follow-up stage also gets assigned its own campaign ID. This is so that you can track the statistics by each individual follow-up stageand by the overall campaign at large. The campaign ID can be found in many places throughout your account, including the confirmation email you get after a batch of automated emails has been sent, the campaign report that goes into the GMass Reports–>CAMPAIGNS Label in Gmail, and your account dashboard.
GMass allows you to set a Reply-To address for a campaign, so replies go to a different address than the one from which you sent the email. GMass will not be able to detect those replies to the different address. So if you have an auto follow-up campaign set to send until you get a reply, using a different reply-to address isn’t a great idea. GMass will show you a warning if you set up a campaign that hits those criteria.
GMass auto-saves your settings, including auto follow-ups, as you work on them. So even if you close the settings box or close the entire email draft, your auto follow-up messages and settings will be there when you re-open.
To “signature” or not to “signature?”
‘Tis the question. You can use the special variable {mysig} inside the text boxes to insert your Gmail signature when the follow-up email is sent. For example, your Stage 1 auto follow-up could look like this:
Add the {mysig} variable and GMass will insert your Gmail signature when the follow-up email is sent.
Should you include your signature in each auto follow-up, even though your signature will still be visible at the bottom of the thread? The jury’s still out on that. For the first few years of our existence, we didn’t provide the ability to include a signature in a text-based Gmail auto follow-up. Of course, if you’re using rich content by choosing a template from the “custom message” drop-down, those messages were likely to include your signature since you created them in separate Gmail Compose windows, and Gmail inserts the signature by default when you launch a new Compose window. Still, it’s a question of whether the prospect receiving your subsequent emails needs to see your signature immediately below each follow-up email and also at the bottom of the thread after the original campaign message.
GMass provides default text in each stage that you’re free to use, but we don’t include the {mysig} variable by default. You can add that if you wish, though.
How the timing works
The timing of a follow-up reminder is based on the time that each individual email in a campaign was sent, not when the campaign was launched. Example scenarios:
The Days for each Stage are based on the time the original email is sent, not when the prior Stage was sent. For example, if Stage 1=2 Days, and Stage 2=5 Days, then Stage 1 will send 2 days after the original email, and Stage 2 will send 5 days after the original email, not 5 days after Stage 1 is sent. (There is a bit of an exception to this though — see the section below on the “Strict count of days between stages” setting.)
If you create your campaign on Monday, but schedule it to be sent on Wednesday, with the first stage follow-up scheduled two days later, then the first follow-up to the non-responder will be sent two days from Wednesday, meaning Friday.
If you create a campaign on Monday and use the “spread out” feature to send 100 emails/day for three days, and you include a Stage 1 follow-up going two days later, then each non-responder will get his first follow-up two days after his original email was sent. So for the 100 emails on Monday, the follow-ups will be sent on Wednesday. For the 100 emails sent on Tuesday, the follow-ups will be sent on Thursday, and so on.
You can also set the Time of Day for an auto follow-up sequence to go out. Without a time, the auto follow-up will go out on the exact 24-hour interval, based on the number of “days” you’ve set. With a time, the auto follow-up will go out after the specified number of days and at the specified time on that day (as long as we can send within 3 hours of the expected send time). Days and times are considered a pair. So for instance, if the expected send time is Wednesday at 11:30 PM, GMass will send follow-ups as long as it’s before Thursday at 2:30 AM.
Set the specific time of day the follow-up emails should be sent.
If you use the “Just create drafts” option on your campaign on a Monday, but then wait to click the link to have the drafts sent until Tuesday, the timing of the automatic follow-ups will be based on Tuesday because that is when the Drafts were sent.
If you enable the Skip Weekends option, then an auto follow-up will never get sent on a weekend, and the different Stage setting for Days become business days, not all days. Monday through Friday are business days. For example, if your original campaign sends on Wednesday and has a Stage 1 follow-up set to 7 days, and you enable Skip Weekends, then the Stage 1 follow-up will send 9 days later on the following Friday, since that Friday is 7 business days after that Wednesday.
You can schedule the emails to go out as much as 1,000 days apart.
How the timing works if a campaign is paused/delayed (for various reasons) when an auto follow-up is scheduled
Sometimes there are exceptional circumstances that affect the timing of auto follow-ups.
There are three primary situations when this happens:
You pause a campaign and its auto follow-ups. Then you resume the campaign later, after an auto follow-up was scheduled.
You run an A/B test with a long decision window, which delays the timing of some of the emails in your campaign and their follow-ups as well.
You hit Gmail’s daily sending limits, which prevents follow-ups from going out at their scheduled time.
We’ve built in workarounds for these scenarios to make sure everyone still gets the auto follow-ups they’re supposed to get — but there’s some math involved.
Here’s an example scenario to illustrate how it works.
Let’s say you have a campaign with a Stage 1 auto follow-up scheduled for day five a Stage 2 auto follow-up scheduled for day eight.
But… you paused the campaign on day four. And you resumed the campaign on day seven. That means those Stage 1 follow-ups didn’t go out on time. (And GMass won’t send someone Stage 2, Stage 3, and so on if they don’t get Stage 1.)
So in this case, Stage 1 will now go out after you resume the campaign on day seven.
And if you had a time set, say 2:00 P.M., the follow-up go out at that time on the day you resumed the campaign. (If you hadn’t had a time set, the follow-up would go out immediately once you resumed.)
And GMass will also make sure to keep the same time distance between your auto follow-ups from then on.
So since Stage 2 was scheduled for day eight, GMass won’t send it one day after the now-rescheduled Stage 1. GMass will calculate the difference between those two follow ups (Day 8 – Day 5) and send Stage 2 three days later.
This system makes sure everyone gets your follow-up sequence as intended, regardless of what kind of intentional or unintentional delays may come up.
The “strict count of days between stages” setting
By default, GMass auto follow-up send dates are calculated relative to the initial campaign date.
However, you might want to make sure your follow-ups are sent relative to each other. For instance, you want to make sure stage 2 goes out three days after stage 1.
Normally, that will happen. But there are potential exceptions where it wouldn’t.
For instance, let’s say you send a campaign on Monday and have stage 1 at 2 days (Wednesday) and stage 2 at 5 days (Saturday). But…
Scenario 1: You manually send stage 1 early on Tuesday, after just 1 day. Stage 2 would still go out as scheduled after 5 days, on Saturday. That means there’s a four-day delay between the stages, not the initial three-day delay.
Scenario 2: Your initial campaign goes out Monday. But when it comes time for stage 1 on Wednesday, your account hits Gmail’s daily sending limit. So some of your stage 1 messages go out Wednesday, but some go out Thursday. Then, when Saturday comes, you don’t hit any limits so all of stage 2 goes out. That means for some people (the ones who got stage 1 on Thursday), there’s a shorter-than-intended gap between stage 1 and stage 2.
If you want to avoid these (and similar) scenarios, you’ll want to use the GMass setting to keep a strict count of days between stages.
Go to the GMass dashboard > Settings > Auto Follow-ups. Then check the box next to Strict count of days between stages.
Now, with this setting turned on, your follow-ups will maintain their prescribed cadence. So if stage 1 is two days and stage 2 is five days, those stages will always go to a recipient three days apart — no matter what happens with delays or anything else.
Re-examining the two scenarios I laid out earlier, here’s how those would be different with Strict count of days between stages turned on.
Remember, in this scenario you send a campaign on Monday and have stage 1 at 2 days (Wednesday) and stage 2 at 5 days (Saturday).
Scenario 1: You manually send stage 1 early on Tuesday, after just 1 day. Stage 2 would now go out on Friday, rather than the initial Saturday, to maintain the three-day spacing between stage 1 and stage 2.
Scenario 2: Your initial campaign goes out Monday. But when it comes time for stage 1 on Wednesday, your account hits Gmail’s daily sending limit. So some of your stage 1 messages go out Wednesday, but some go out Thursday. Now, everyone who got stage 1 on Wednesday gets stage 2 on Saturday — but everyone who got stage 1 on Thursday gets stage 2 on Sunday.
One thing to note: “Strict count of days between stages” is an account-level setting, not one you select on a campaign-by-campaign basis. You can turn it on and off in your dashboard, however do know it will apply to all campaigns while it’s on.
What counts as a reply?
We’ve refined our algorithm that detects replies to an outreach campaign by poring over thousands of sample emails. Our reply detection mechanism is now fairly accurate but isn’t 100% perfect.
Generally speaking, an email is only counted as a reply if it’s a legitimate reply from a person and not a bounce or an out-of-office auto-reply. An email has a much higher chance of being counted as a reply if it appears as a reply to the same conversation thread in Gmail. Out-of-office auto-replies usually arrive as part of a separate thread, and not part of the original thread, so this is what prevents them from being counted as a reply.
And as we mentioned earlier, if you use a different Reply-To address for your campaign, GMass won’t be able to detect replies to that other address.
Images in follow-up emails
If you use the rich text content option for your Gmail auto follow-up sequences, then any images you insert into the Compose window when creating the content for your follow-up stages will also be preserved. There was a time where images would “break” when the actual follow-up email was sent, but as of April 2020, that issue is fixed. The reason the images would sometimes break is that Gmail inserts images as embedded images rather than hosted images when you use the standard “Insert Image” icon in the Compose window’s toolbar. Embedded images are images where the full content of the image is part of the email message, rather than being hosted on a web server somewhere.
Attachments in follow-up emails
Whether you include attachments in the original email or any of the subsequent follow-up stages, they are handled properly and in a manner that we think optimizes the experience for your recipient. The rules for attachments in auto follow-ups are as follows:
Any attachments that are part of the original email will be sent as part of the original email, just as you’d expect.
If you set rich a text follow-up stage that also has attachments, when the follow-up email goes out, it will go out with that specific stage’s attachments.
If a follow-up stage does NOT have its own attachments, then the follow-up email will still be sent with the attachments from the original email message.
For example, let’s say your original email contains the attachment “Document.pdf.” Your Stage 1 auto follow-up is just the text “Hey, just making sure you saw this.” When that follow-up email goes out, it will still contain the attachment Document.pdf.
If, however, your original email contains the attachment “Document.pdf,” and you set your Stage 1 auto follow-up to be a rich text message with the attachment “Proposal.pdf,” then that Gmail auto follow-up email will go out with just Proposal.pdf and not Document.pdf.
Why this behavior?
Technically, we’re breaking the rules of how follow-up email replies work. If you send a regular email to someone with an attachment (by using the regular blue Gmail Send button), and then after a few days of no reply, you retrieve that email in your Sent Mail, click Reply, and type a follow-up on top of your original email, that follow-up would NOT contain the attachment from the original email (unless you re-attached it). However, we think there’s a benefit to re-sending the attachments with each Gmail auto follow-up sequence unless the sequence contains its own attachments.
Reports
When you download the Main Campaign Report CSV file for any campaign that has auto follow-ups, you get additional columns that reveal a “matrix” of the various auto follow-up stages, and which recipients have so far received which stage of follow-up.
The main campaign report CSV showing auto follow-up stages
This is especially useful if you have an automated campaign or a distributed campaign sending a certain number of emails/day. You can easily see who has received the original email, who has received each of the various auto follow-up stages, and how many days ago each follow-up stage was sent.
This report is accessible by clicking the “download main campaign report” link from any report under the GMass Reports–>[CAMPAIGNS] Label in your Gmail account.
What you see and what your recipient sees
Your recipient will see your follow-up emails on top of the original and part of the same conversational thread.
You will see the follow-up emails as part of the same email thread in your Sent Mail folder, and each consecutive follow-up reminder will include the original and any previous reminders below.
The idea is that a follow-up email looks just like it would if you had found the original email from your Sent Mail, hit Reply, and then typed a new email on top and hit Send.
Understanding why someone is in one stage but not in another
Each time a sequential stage of a campaign goes out, a complex set of rules determines exactly who gets that sequence. If your sequences are based on “replies”, then it’s easy to think that Stage 3 should go out to everyone in the campaign except the people that replied to Stage 2, but it’s actually more complex than that. When a particular stage sends, here’s how the list of recipients is compiled:
First, the list of people in the original campaign is compiled.
Then, a list of people that have replied to all prior stages is compiled, and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the account’s unsubscribe list is compiled and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the account’s bounce list is compiled and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the campaign’s suppression list is examined, and anyone on the campaign-specific suppression list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Timing can also play a factor. It’s easy to think that if I send a campaign to 100 people, and also have 3 stages set up, that if 10 people reply to the original campaign, that 90 people will now receive Stage 1. And that if 5 people then reply to Stage 1, then 85 people will receive Stage 2. But, what if in between Stage 1 sending and Stage 2 sending, 2 more people reply to the original campaign? Then, those 2 people will also be eliminated from Stage 2. Or, what if in between Stage 1 and Stage 2 sending, 1 person unsubscribes from a campaign that you sent them 3 months ago. Then, that 1 person will also be eliminated from Stage 1. Finally, let’s say someone replies to Stage 1 but still receives Stage 2. How did that happen? It’s possible that the person replied to Stage 1 after Stage 2 had been sent!
And when you want to see who’s getting what messages and when…
Calendar view for your past and upcoming auto follow-ups
It can be tricky to keep track of when your auto follow-ups are scheduled to go out, especially if:
You’re dealing with a recurring campaign that’s starting the sequence for different recipients at different times.
With the calendar view, you can see when auto follow-up stages are scheduled to send (in your local time zone) — and who will receive them. You can also see all of the past auto follow-ups sent for the campaign.
The calendar view takes your sequence cut-off triggers into account; for instance, if you stop the sequence when you get a reply, the numbers for future sends will reflect that. (And, when you get more replies, those numbers will go down.)
To access the calendar view of your auto follow-ups, head to the GMass dashboard. You can see which campaigns have auto follow-ups with the calendar icon.
When you click the calendar icon, you’ll see a report showing you past and future auto follow-ups for the campaign.
Past sends are in orange; today’s send is in green; future sends are in blue.
You can click any number to see a full list of the email addresses who will receive or received that follow-up. And you can download a CSV of those addresses.
If you spot someone on one of those lists for future sends and don’t want them to get the follow-up, a super quick way to remove them is to add them to the campaign’s suppression list.
Go into Gmail and find the draft of the campaign. Open the GMass settings, and head to the advanced section.
In the Suppression area, enter that person’s email address. Then click the green SAVE Changes button.
Beware of these dangers
The sending of auto follow-up emails is dependent upon certain factors, like being able to locate the original “sent” email in your Gmail account. Beware of these dangers which can lead to auto follow-up mishaps:
Do not delete the original campaign from GMass Reports –> Sent Copies.
Doing so will prevent your auto follow-up emails from sending because GMass relies on finding the original campaign to construct the auto follow-up.
Do not delete the individual sent emails from your Sent Mail folder.
Doing so will also prevent auto follow-up emails from sending because GMass won’t be able to find the original sent email to add the follow-up to it.
Do not add the “GMass Reports –> Replies” Label manually when replies to your campaign arrive in your Inbox.
GMass will automatically apply this Label to replies. If you manually apply this Label, GMass will skip the message and be unaware of the reply, and then an auto follow-up will go out to someone that has already replied.
Did your auto follow-ups fail to send? You can send it manually
If your auto follow-up email sequence didn’t send for some reason, whether it’s your fault or ours, you can manually send a one-off follow-up email that will still be part of the same email conversation as the original email. Here’s how to do it.
First you’ll need to create a CampaignDraft of the initial campaign (and get the campaignDraftId).
Then, in the Campaigns method, you can set up your auto follow-up sequence using the stage options.
stageOneDays, stageTwoDays, and so on with other stageNumDays: Number of days before the stage is sent
stageNumCampaignText: Text to use for plain text follow-up
stageNumCampaignId: Campaign ID of rich text follow-up message. If you’ve specified both a text and campaign ID follow-up, GMass will use the campaign ID.
stageNumAction: Determine what recipient (in)action leads to this stage.
r: No reply
o: No open
c: No click
a: Send to everyone, regardless of the actions they’ve taken on any prior email in the sequence
stageNumTime: Time of day the follow-up should go out.
And now I can go to my Gmail drafts folder, find this campaign, and check the settings to see it’s all set up correct.I can also send myself a test of the entire sequence to double check.
You can use the auto follow-up settings to create a traditional drip email campaign as well. For example, if you want a series of 8 emails to go out in a timed manner after someone signs up on your website, you can do that.
The GMass campaign DRAFT must exist in your account under the GMass Auto Follow-ups Label to edit or delete auto follow-ups. If you accidentally deleted the DRAFT, try restoring your DRAFT.
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Below is detailed explanation of each item in the GMass Settings box, which is accessible by clicking the “up” arrow next to the GMass button.
Default Settings and Saving Your Settings
Some of the settings you see when you open the Settings box for a campaign will be the same as your most recent sent campaign. (For instance, if you turned off open and click tracking on your last campaign, they’ll be turned off by default on this one.)
GMass does this for your convenience — our bet is if you changed a setting for one campaign, you’re more likely to use it the same way for the next. Of course, if that isn’t the case, you can always change any of those settings in your new campaign.
And GMass auto-saves your settings as you work on them for the campaign. So if you close your draft then re-open it later, your settings will be just how you left ’em.
The Three Buttons Across the Top
Spam Solver
GMass’s one-of-a-kind Spam Solver tests whether your email is likely to end up in your recipients’ inboxes, spam folders, or promotions folders.
It works by sending this email out as a test to several test email addresses across a variety of accounts and seeing which of these three types of folders your email landed in. You can then make tweaks to the email in the Spam Solver and retest to see if your deliverability improves.
We recommend running Spam Solver on every campaign before you send it — especially if you’re using a newer email address or domain.
Link Checker
Link Checker checks all the links in your message and generates screenshots of each so you can easily see which links go where.
It’s great for ensuring you didn’t make a copy/paste mistake when setting your links.
Email Analyzer
GMass’s Email Analyzer sends a copy of your email to our email tester, which then tells you what IP sent the email, whether the email passed SPF and DKIM, and gives you full access to the headers and MIME parts of the email.
Testing
Send Test
This button sends a test email to the address(es) of your choice.
Additionally, the test email message will include personalization if there is personalization information available for the test email address. Meaning, if you’re connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet to do a mail merge, and the test address is one of the addresses in the spreadsheet, then the test email will include personalization.
Or, if the test address is a Gmail contact, and the address is part of the To field already in your composed message, then sending a test to the address will include First and Last Name personalization.
Send Test options
You can choose to send a test email to your address or to create a draft of a test email (which you can then examine in your Gmail Drafts folder).
The Send all stages option is great for campaigns with auto follow-ups. When you check that box, your test will include the entire email sequence so you can see exactly how each email in your series will look to recipients.
Message Creation Options
Templates
This dropdown shows all of your past GMass campaigns and how many people they were sent to.
Choose any past campaign and the Subject/Message of your Compose window will be set to that campaign.
In the Campaign Text option, you can have AI generate a rough draft of a template as well as your auto follow-ups. GMass will even handle all the settings for those auto follow-ups as it inserts them into the campaign.
In Variations, GMass will create spintax variations of a sentence or two — as many as you like. This is helpful if you want to vary up the contents of every email you send in a campaign (so every one isn’t identical).
HTML
Gmail doesn’t have a native way for you to edit the HTML for your emails.
That’s not going to fly if you want to send something with any sort of design.
GMass adds HTML editing capabilities to Gmail. Just click the HTML link and you’ll be able to edit the underlying code behind your email (or paste in your own templates).
Personalize
These buttons insert personalization variables into your Message in the format of {Variable}. When you choose a personalization tag, it gets copied to your clipboard so that you can easily paste it into your Subject or Message. For more information, see the GMass Personalization Guide.
Unsubscribe Link
Inserts an unsubscribe link into your message, wherever the cursor is. The language of the unsubscribe link can be customized, but the actual URL should remain unaltered. For example, if you want to change the language to:
Please unsubscribe if you wish to never hear from us again
You can do that, but just link the appropriate words to this URL:
https://www.gmass.co/gmass/u?u=OUTBOUND
You can also click the “copy” icon to the right to copy the unsubscribe URL to the clipboard, to make it easier to set whatever text you like to the unsubscribe link.
Tracking
Choose whether you’d like to track opens and clicks. By default, both are selected. If you choose tracking options, you can view who opened or clicked an email by accessing the GMass reports after you send your campaign.
Action
Send emails vs Create Drafts
By default, clicking the GMass button will send your campaign, sending one email to each address in the To field.
However, if you want to spot check your messages before they are sent, you can choose “Create Drafts.” Only Drafts will be created, and no emails will be sent.
You can then review them in your Drafts folder, and GMass will email you a link to click to either send or delete the drafts.
How do you want to send those emails?
If you’ve connected an external SMTP server to your GMass account for virtually unlimited sending (breaking Gmail’s limits), this option will appear in the settings. Otherwise, this option will not appear because then all emails are sent natively through Gmail.
If you have connected an SMTP server, you’ll have the option to send each campaign natively through Gmail or through the SMTP server.
Also, when you shrink this section, you’ll see whether you’re sending via Gmail or an external service. That should be handy for quick reference as you work on your campaigns.
GMass has complete throttling capabilities. You can space your email so they send over a number of days rather than sending them all at once. You can set this to as few as 1 email per day if you wish. If left set to “max”, which is the default, GMass will send as many emails as your account allows and save the rest for future days.
You can also choose to add a delay after each email is sent — from a few seconds to a longer delay of several minutes. Some cold emailers feel setting a delay better simulates the process of manually sending messages.
This is useful for email reminders to a group of people or for setting up an automated campaign that sends your campaign to only new rows in a Google Sheet.
Additionally, if you connected to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, an additional checkbox called “Repeat daily…” will also be shown. Checking this box will enable the automated recurring campaigns feature.
The default choice is “New Messages”, which means that your email marketing campaign will send as a new email thread.
If you choose “Replies”, your message will be tacked onto the last thread you had with each recipient. If you have never emailed a particular recipient in the past and therefore have no prior conversation, then the email will go out as a new thread. Here’s more on sending as new messages versus replies.
Inbox rotation is a popular technique with cold emailers, as it’s a way to send high volume campaigns while keeping the sending volume low from each individual mailbox.
Here in the Settings box you can add new sending accounts, choose which sending accounts to use, and even set daily limits for each individual account.
Verify
GMass has built-in email verification, which tests each address for validity before sending to them.
This is a great way to keep bounces low, as those can hurt your deliverability.
A/B Test
You can A/B test your campaigns with this setting. GMass will send one variation to one portion of your list and another variation to another portion. Then it can automatically send the “winning” variation to the rest of the list (or you can send the winner manually).
Triggers
Triggered emails are an innovative GMass feature that automatically send a message to recipients when they open, click, or reply on your campaign — so you know they’re in their inbox.
In the Settings box you can create your triggered messages and fine-tune their sending options.
GMass can suppress emails to certain recipients in your campaign based on different criteria. This way you don’t have to remove them from your Google Sheets of contacts; you can just have GMass skip sending to them.
Suppression by Campaign
To set a suppression list for a campaign, just select the past campaigns whose recipients you want to eliminate from your current campaign. Any past campaign can be used as a suppression list for the current campaign.
You can select a single campaign or multiple campaigns from the dropdown. Use the CTRL key on Windows or the Command key on a Mac to select multiple lists from the Suppression select box. Any email address that was part of the chosen campaign will be suppressed, or eliminated from, this current campaign.
When the Aggressive box is checked, GMass will suppress messages to everyone who’s received the suppression campaign AND anyone who is scheduled to receive it will be suppressed in the current campaign.
Suppression by domains or email addresses
To suppress emails to specific users, or an entire domain (like all recipients at uber.com), enter them in the “These domains and email addresses” field.
The skip logging option deletes all the emails from your “Sent” folder after your campaign sends, in order to prevent your “Sent” folder from feeling cluttered.
GMass allows you to run simple, one-question polls in your campaigns. You can configure the poll for your email by clicking the “Simple email poll” link.
Timer
You can add a countdown timer to a GMass campaign, counting down a certain number of hours or to a specific date and time.
Preview Text
Set the preview text that appears in the inbox either next to or under the subject line (depending on the email client). This is a popular feature for email marketing.
Friendly Name
A friendly name by which to remember this campaign. This name will appear in reports and various notifications about the campaign.
Learning More About How GMass Works
The GMass settings box is a compact but incredibly powerful tool for fine-tuning your campaigns.
Want to learn about the rest of GMass?
Quickstart Guide – step-by-step instructions to set up GMass and send your first mail merge campaign.
GMass dashboard – while you’ll use the settings box to control an individual campaign, you handle account-level changes and management on the GMass dashboard.
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I just launched a GMass enhancement that I’ve been needing for my own purposes for a while — the ability to easily load a Subject and Message into the Gmail Compose window from a previous mail merge campaign, without having to copy/paste.
Choose Your Content
In the GMass Settings box, you’ll notice a “Templates” dropdown. All of your past campaigns will appear here. Just choose one, and watch the magic happen. The Subject/Message will be filled out for you, and you’ll have the option to load the prior campaign’s settings as well.
In this example, I’m loading the content from the last GMass feature announcement, regarding CSV reports. The content is pulled straight from your own Gmail account. Note that a couple weeks ago, GMass started saving all of your sent email campaigns under the “Sent Copies” Label under “GMass Reports”. When you choose an old campaign from this dropdown, the content is pulled from that “Sent Copies” area.
If your template list starts to get too crowded after a while because you’ve sent so many campaigns, you can remove templates from your list in the GMass dashboard > Settings > Templates settings.
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If you send an email that bounces or have someone unsubscribe, you (almost certainly) don’t want other people on your team continuing to send them messages.
That’s when GMass’s globally shared unsubscribes and bounces come into play.
When you turn on global unsubscribes and/or global bounces in your account, GMass won’t send emails (aka GMass will “suppress” emails) to addresses that have unsubscribed/bounced from other people at the same email sending domain and on your Team plan.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example…
How Global Unsubscribes and Global Bounces Work in GMass
Let’s say your organization has the following five users:
All five are using GMass, and some members of the company might be emailing the same people. Let’s say ben@company.com and joe@company.com both send emails to leads and therefore sometimes send to recipients in common with each other.
Normally, if a recipient unsubscribes from ben@company.com’s emailings, the recipient could still potentially receive emails from joe@company.com.
But with the Global Unsubscribe feature, the recipient would not receive emails from joe@company.com. As long as joe@company.com turns on “Use Global Unsubscribes” for his account, GMass will suppress emails he sends to addresses that are on ben@company.com’s list — or the unsubscribe lists of everyone else in the organization.
Similarly, you may also want to use Global Bounce suppression. If a particular email address bounces for ben@company.com, then it benefits joe@company.com from an email deliverability perspective to avoid sending to the same invalid email address. Normally, an attempt by joe@company.com to send to that address would result in a send and then a bounce. With Global Bounces, the attempted send to that address by joe@company.com would be suppressed by GMass.
This also works for anyone on a GMass for Teams plan. You can have users on your team with different email address domains.(e.g., you could have some people @company.com and some people @differentcompany.com and other people @gmail.com.) GMass will check the unsubscribe and bounce lists for everyone on your team.
One more example. Let’s say kim@company.com does NOT have global unsubscribes turned on. That means when she sends a campaign, GMass will only check her unsubscribe list — not the unsubscribe lists of Ben, Joe, or anyone else in the company.
But… since Ben and Joe both have global unsubscribes turned on, when they send campaigns, GMass will still check for them against Kim’s list.
Who GMass filters out when you have global unsubscribes and/or global bounces turned on
When you have global unsubscribes and/or bounces turned on, here’s who GMass will automatically filter out of your campaign. (So even if you try to send an email, GMass will suppress it and not send it.)
Your account’s own unsubscribe and bounce list.
The unsubscribe and bounce lists from anyone on the same email domain, even if they have global unsubscribes/bounces turned off for their own account.
The unsubscribe and bouncelists from anyone on your Team plan, even if they have global unsubscribes/bounces turned off for their own account.
It’s up to each individual person in the organization and/or on the team if they want to use global unsubscribes and global bounces on their own account.
How this works for free Gmail.com accounts
Global unsubscribes/bounces work a bit different if you’re using a free @gmail.com or @googlemail.com address.
When you turn on global unsubscribes/bounces as a free Gmail user, you won’t share unsubscribe/bounce lists with everyone on the domain — because that’s every single person with a free @gmail account.
However, people with free Gmail accounts who are on a Team plan will have campaigns suppressed against their teammates’ unsubscribe/bounce lists.
How this works for GMass MultiSend accounts
If you’re using GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation, you can use global unsubscribes across all your sending accounts.
If you have global unsubscribes turned on in your main account, GMass will suppress emails to anyone on that list from all your connected sending accounts (and will also suppress emails to anyone on those accounts’ unsubscribe lists).
GMass will also suppress any emails to unsubscribed domains from all sending accounts. (See more details and an example here.)
Turning Global Unsubscribes and/or Global Bounces On or Off in the GMass Dashboard
To enable Global Unsubscribes, Global Bounces, or both, just head to your GMass dashboard.
Both features are in the settings, and you can turn each feature on (or off) with the checkbox.
You can also remove addresses manually from your unsubscribe or bounce lists by clicking on their respective Manage links in the GMass dashboard.
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We just eliminated the fear of sending an email marketing campaign.
Afraid that personalization won’t work? Afraid your tracked links won’t work? Afraid the unsubscribe link won’t work? Afraid the images won’t show?Fear no more!
We just launched a new capability that allows you to create all of your emails as Drafts first, and then after you’ve reviewed them to make sure they look okay, you can send them with one click.
How to use
GMass has always had the ability to Just create Drafts rather than send actual emails. The setting is in the settings box next to the main GMass button:
Until now, however, there was no way to do anything with those Drafts. You could open up each Draft and hit the Send button manually, but that is a time-consuming process. If you didn’t want to send the Drafts, and instead wanted to delete them, then you would have to select all the Drafts, and click the Gmail Trash icon to remove them, and then go to the next page and repeat the process.
Now, after GMass creates your Drafts, you can either SEND them if they look how you want, or DELETE them if you wish to start over. Either option requires simply clicking a link that GMass will send you after your Drafts are created.
First, review the Drafts to make sure you approve:
Here’s the email you will get if you choose the Just create Drafts option when using GMass. You can choose to SEND the Drafts or DELETE them if you made a mistake:
Clicking the link to SEND will take you to this page:
From here just click the button to confirm, and within a few minutes, all of your Drafts will send.
Should you use the GMass link to send the Drafts, or can you open them up and send them on your own?
The answer is: Use the GMass link.
While you could open up each Draft individually and hit the regular Gmail Send button, that would prevent GMass from recording that each Draft has been sent. That would also prevent GMass from being able to track certain metrics on the email, like detecting if the recipient replied, which would have repercussions if you’re also using auto follow-up emails based on replies.
Whatever you do, do not open up each draft and click the GMass button. Since the Drafts were already created by GMass, they already have open tracking, click tracking, and other attributes incorporated into them, if those options were chosen. If you click the GMass button on each individual Draft to send it, then not only will they be double open and click tracked, but then each individual recipient email will be treated as a separate email campaign, which will muddle your Reports with extraneous and meaningless data.
Technical Details for High Volume Senders
If you enter a value for Schedule when other than Now and select Just create Drafts, then the schedule will be honored and your Drafts won’t be created until the specified time.
When you send normally, without choosing Just create Drafts, GMass employs a number of tactics to distribute large campaigns over multiple days and prevent your account from sending beyond its allowed limits. These same tactics apply when you choose Just create Drafts. Only the allowed number of Drafts will be created, based on how many emails you’ve sent in the last 24 hours, while the rest will be scheduled for creation on subsequent days.
When you click the SEND THESE DRAFTS NOW button, all Drafts for the campaign, regardless of number or schedule, will attempt to send. For example, if you initiate a campaign to 3,600 recipients from a Google Workspace account, and you set it to distribute 1,800 emails/day, then 1,800 Drafts will be created the first day and 1,800 Drafts will be created the second day. If you don’t click the SEND THESE DRAFTS NOW button between the first and the second day, and only click it after the second day, GMass will attempt to send all 3,600 Drafts, and this will result in you exceeding your Gmail account limits.
As of July 2024, we’ve made sure the “Send these drafts now” link only sends the drafts referenced in the notification that contains the link. This is important for high-volume daily recurring campaigns. In those cases, it’s possible clicking the “Send these drafts now” link would send drafts — but not all would be set due to limits. Then, 24 hours later, when the next day’s drafts are created, those would be sent without review along with the first day’s leftover drafts. We fixed that so now, you’ll have a chance to review all drafts before sending.
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We just deployed a bug fix that corrects an issue where you would receive an error when connecting GMass to certain Google Docs spreadsheets where an email address had more than 100 characters.
This would be the case if your spreadsheet’s email address column accidentally had text that wasn’t an email address or had multiple email addresses in it. If GMass detected a row in the email address column with text greater than 100 characters, you would get this “entity validation” error:
We have corrected this now by truncating the value of any email address to the first 100 characters. That way, GMass will still connect to a spreadsheet with a “bad” row and pull your email addresses and other fields, but any rows containing an email address value of more than 100 characters will be discarded in the actual sending process, since these addresses will likely be invalid.
Here is an example spreadsheet with an invalid value in the email address column. In this case, the 4th row would be truncated, resulting in an invalid address, and none of the addresses in that row would be sent to.
Note that other non-email address columns may still have values greater than 100 characters. For example, if you have a “Greeting” column, where the column stores a customized greeting sentence that is personalized to each email address, then this sentence can certainly be greater than 100 characters.
Also note that GMass auto-detects which column stores your email addresses versus columns that contain other data (like Greeting, FirstName, LastName, etc.). You won’t need to tell GMass which column in your spreadsheet contains the email addresses to send to. Also, the column need not be named “EmailAddress” as shown in the example — it can be named anything.
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Want to see a record of what you sent and to whom? Want to copy/paste the content of a previous email marketing campaign into a new campaign?
Now you can!
All mass emails sent from GMass are now archived under the “Sent Copies” Label under “GMass Reports”. Each archived message will show the original Subject/Message of your mail merge campaign and include the addresses in the To field. You can use the “Sent Copies” area to easily review past emails and to copy/paste a previous email marketing campaigns into a new campaign with additional email addresses.
What is not stored here?
GMass will not store your test emails (emails sent with the “Send Test Email” button) here. Also, if you reply to an email and click the GMass button, the reply won’t be stored here. Only actual broadcast email campaigns where you click the GMass button are stored here.
When will a campaign show up here?
A campaign only shows here after it has begun sending. For example, if you schedule an email campaign to send tomorrow morning, the campaign won’t show under “Sent Copies” until tomorrow morning.
How can you use this area?
You can copy the Subject/Message of campaigns from here and paste into a new Compose window to re-send a previous campaign to new recipients.
Why has the From Address been changed from your actual address to GMass_Sent_Copy@gmass.co?
We did this to differentiate between the individual emails that were actually sent versus the messages that show here, which are just a record of the content you’ve sent and to whom.
What’s the difference between this “Sent Copies” area and Gmail’s “Sent Mail” folder?
The difference is that the original email campaign is stored here as a “template”, meaning the content of the email before links are tracked, before open tracking is added, and before personalization is added. If you look in your Gmail “Sent Mail” folder, you will find the individual emails that were sent to the individual email recipients, and those copies show the detail of the tracked links, personalization, and other changes that are custom to that recipient. If you wish to use an old message for a new campaign, you should copy/paste from this area, NOT the Gmail “Sent Mail” folder, since there you will find the individual emails which have been customized for each individual recipient.
Note that in this area, your campaigns are stored with all of your recipient addresses in the To field. But do not fear, because that is not how the emails were actually sent. The emails were sent out individually, and your email list has not been exposed to your recipients.
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While I hate to encourage people to remove GMass from their Gmail accounts, there are rare but legitimate reasons you may want to.
Here’s one, for example…
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:
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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)
Because there are multiple From Addresses to choose from, the From Name will be set correctly when the GMass button is used.
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.
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