Mailboxes for outreach

Your organization writes to prospects from a real mailbox you own, and reads their replies in the same one. You can give the whole organization a single address, or give individual seats their own.

Connecting a mailbox

Mailboxes live under Credentials in your dashboard sidebar. You can also connect one without leaving the outreach pages: whenever no mailbox is available, the Sending mailbox box on Organization → Outreach and the Mailbox box on a seat’s Profile & mailbox page both offer the same three buttons.

Gmail

Choose Gmail (listed under Credentials as Gmail Mailbox). You are sent to Google’s own consent screen, you sign in as the mailbox owner, and you come back connected. You are never asked for your Google password, and we do not store it. We recommend this for any Gmail or Google Workspace address.

Outlook or Hotmail

Choose Outlook (listed as Outlook / Hotmail Mailbox). You sign in on Microsoft’s own screen and come back connected. Microsoft asks separately for permission to send, so if you connected an Outlook mailbox some time ago and sending fails, reconnect it and accept the newer permission.

Any other provider, including your own domain

Choose Other provider (IMAP/SMTP) and fill in what your provider gives you. This is the route for a mailbox on your own domain, a hosting company’s mail, Fastmail, Zoho, a self-hosted server, and anything else that speaks IMAP.

This form needs the incoming (IMAP) details even if you mean to use the mailbox send only. Fill them in anyway, then clear Read replies in this mailbox on the seat. (A credential that names no incoming server can only ever be bound send-only; the platform enforces that.)

A typical custom-domain mailbox uses IMAP on 993 with SSL and SMTP on 465, with the full email address as the username.

Checking that it works

There is no “test connection” button. Instead, prove the mailbox end to end with test mode:

1. Choose the mailbox and save. On Organization → Outreach, pick it under Sending mailbox (or on a seat’s Profile & mailbox page for one seat) and press Save.
2. Look at “Mailboxes in use”. The panel on the right of the Outreach settings page lists every address the organization can send from, with the address itself. If the mailbox you just chose is not listed, or the seat page shows a warning that the saved mailbox cannot be used, the connection is not working; reconnect it.
3. Turn on test mode and let one message go. The email arrives at your own address with [TEST → …] in the subject, and it has really traveled through the mailbox you just connected. That is the proof. Check whether it landed in your inbox or your spam folder before you switch test mode off.

Giving a seat its own mailbox

A seat with its own mailbox sends from it and reads replies in it, so a prospect is corresponding with that seat’s address rather than a shared one. If that address belongs to a real person, you can have the seat send from it without the platform ever opening their inbox; see send only below.

1. Open the seat’s profile page. Go to Organization → Autonomy and press Profile next to the seat in the Seats table, or click a seat on the Live page. The page is titled Profile & mailbox.
2. Pick the mailbox. Under Mailbox, choose from The mailbox this seat uses, or leave it on No mailbox of its own. Decide whether to leave Read replies in this mailbox checked, then press Save profile & mailbox.
3. Give the seat a name while you are there. A first and last name on the same page make messages go out as that person rather than under the business name. With no name, the business name is used.

The platform enforces these rules for you:

• One mailbox serves one seat. A mailbox another seat already uses cannot be picked, because two seats sharing an inbox would answer each other’s replies.
• A seat with no mailbox of its own uses the organization’s. That is the normal case, not a fallback; most seats never need one.
• A seat whose saved mailbox has stopped working sends nothing. It does not quietly switch to another address, because the prospect is holding a thread on the first one. The seat page shows a warning until you reconnect it or clear the setting.

Send only: a person’s address without reading their mail

A seat mailbox is normally opened on a schedule you choose, from every 5 minutes to once a day, so replies, requests to stop and failed deliveries are picked up. That is right for an address whose only job is outreach, and wrong for somebody’s real working mailbox: that inbox also holds their own mail, their suppliers’ invoices and mail from their accountant, and with new enquiries switched on a stranger’s message in it is something a seat would answer.

On the seat’s Profile & mailbox page, clear Read replies in this mailbox.

A reply that arrives in your organization’s mailbox is still attributed correctly: it is matched to the company and the conversation by the message it answers, not by the inbox it landed in, so the lead, the thread and the seat that answers are the same as they would have been. The answer goes back out from the seat’s own address, carrying the same Reply-To.

Send only has rules of its own, also enforced for you:

• You need an organization sending mailbox first. That is where send-only replies are directed, so with none chosen the box cannot be cleared. If your organization later loses it, a send-only seat stops sending rather than mailing from an inbox nobody opens.
• Your organization’s own mailbox is always read and cannot be made send-only, because it is where every request to be left alone arrives.

Daily limits and warm-up, per mailbox

The daily limit you set on the Outreach settings page is the limit for each address, not a budget shared across the organization. A new address also has to earn its way up to it:

The ramp is a ceiling, never a floor: if you set the limit to 5, it stays 5 forever. A seat mailbox warms up from its own first send, so adding a seat address to an organization that has been running for months still starts at 5.

Mailboxes in use on the Outreach settings page shows, for each address: how many of today’s allowance it has spent, whether it is the organization’s mailbox or a named seat’s, which folder its replies are read from (or send only, where none are), where it is on the ramp, and how many of today’s sends went to your test address. A seat’s own page shows the same figures for its one address.

Staying out of the spam folder

None of this is specific to this platform; any business sending cold email has to do it. Do it before your first campaign rather than after.

• Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain. These are three DNS records that tell receiving mail servers your mail is really yours. Gmail and Outlook both treat their absence badly. Your mail provider will have a page with the exact values for whoever manages your DNS.
• Start low and stay low for a while. The warm-up ramp does this for you, and raising your daily limit on day 15 is not an instruction to use all of it. A steady trickle builds a reputation; a sudden burst from a quiet address looks like a hijacked account.
• Do not buy lists. Bought addresses are stale, full of spam traps, and in the United Kingdom they will not give you a lawful basis anyway. The platform asks for evidence that each business may be emailed, and a purchased CSV is not evidence.
• Consider a separate sending domain. If outreach ever goes badly, the damage lands on the domain it was sent from. Many businesses use something like mail.yourcompany.com or a close variant so their main domain is never at risk.
• Watch the replies. Bounces and unsubscribes are handled for you, but a rising bounce rate is a sign the list is bad, not that the limit is too low.

Next: Outreach for the settings themselves, and Inbox and approvals for approving messages before they go.