Sender identities
A verified domain cannot send on its own. The thing that sends is a sender identity: the From address, plus the compliance information that goes in every footer. Create them under Email > Senders.
An identity activates only when both conditions hold: its domain is active,
and the compliance fields are filled in. Try to activate one on a domain that is
still verifying and you get a plain error saying so rather than a silent
failure.
If you later edit an active identity in a way that removes a required address or
disclaimer, the identity is paused rather than left sending non-compliant
mail. The save succeeds and sending stops, which is the safe direction: a
paused identity is a problem you notice today, while non-compliant mail is one
you find out about from a regulator.
Each sender is isolated
Every sender identity gets its own isolated reputation on our sending infrastructure. Practically, this means a committee that sends both a high-volume fundraising program and a careful volunteer-coordination program can keep them apart: if the fundraising sender runs into trouble, the volunteer sender is not dragged down with it. It is the reason to create a second identity rather than reuse one, whenever two programs have genuinely different audiences or risk profiles.When sending is paused for you
Our sending infrastructure can disable an individual sender on its own judgment, usually for a complaint rate it considers unacceptable. When that happens the platform does not let campaigns keep failing message by message. Every in-flight campaign on that identity is paused automatically, the reason is recorded on the identity, and your organization is notified. Because identities are isolated, this stops at the one sender. Your other identities keep sending.Building a campaign
A campaign is one message, from one sender identity, to one or more lists. Pick the audience, write the subject and body, and the platform deduplicates recipients across lists and removes anyone suppressed before it counts your audience. Recipient policy decides which subscribed contacts on those lists actually get the send.max_reach (the default) sends to everyone subscribed.
max_deliverability narrows the send to contacts whose current validation
verdict is deliverable, skipping anyone who has never been validated. This is
recipient_policy on the campaign, settable on create or update.
The builder is organized in five groups:
The send window and pacing are worth setting deliberately. A window keeps a
large send inside civilized hours in the recipient’s time zone rather than
arriving at 3 AM, and pacing spreads it out instead of dropping the whole thing
on a mailbox provider in one burst, which is itself a spam signal.
Templates are built separately, under Email > Templates, and the builder
picks from your saved ones. That is where the document editor, Import HTML,
and Draft with Lincoln live. See Templates below.
Link domain. Every link in a campaign is rewritten to a tracked URL, the
open pixel is added for you, and pasted bare URLs become links too, so click
metrics are never optional. Choose which host those URLs use under Link
domain in the builder: any active tracking domain the organization owns or
shares (the
links. host created with your sending domain under Admin >
Domains), or the platform host. Branding the host keeps link reputation with
your domain and matches what recipients see. If the chosen domain is not active
yet the checklist says so and the send falls back to the platform host.
No A/B testing, and what to do instead
There is no A/B split test. One campaign is one message to one audience. The supported equivalent is Duplicate campaign plus Compare campaigns: duplicate a campaign, change the one thing you want to test, send both to comparable segments, and then compare up to four campaigns side by side on the report page. It takes one more step than a split test and gives you a result you can read a week later, rather than a winner picked automatically on an hour of early opens.Templates
Templates live under Email > Templates and are reusable across campaigns. There are three ways to make one:- The document editor. Write the email like a document. Type
/for a menu of blocks (text, headings, lists, buttons, donate buttons, images, columns, sections, dividers, spacers, quotes, footer text, a compliance footer, and a raw HTML block), and@to insert a merge tag as an editable pill. Paste from Google Docs or Notion and the formatting carries over. A Design rail sets the background, card color, font, and heading, text, link, and button colors, and a Checks panel shows live compliance checks, server lint, and the size against Gmail’s 102 KB clip, alongside a desktop and mobile preview. - Import HTML. Paste HTML or upload a file, for a design your team already has or one exported from another tool. An HTML template is edited as text, and a document template can be converted to one, one way, with confirmation.
- Draft with Lincoln. Describe the email and the platform’s AI agent writes it, returning editable blocks in the document editor. See below.
Draft with Lincoln
Lincoln, the AI agent already drafting your text replies, writes email designs too. The Draft with Lincoln button sits in the template editor’s toolbar and on the templates page. Describe the email you want, optionally pick up to six images and your brand colors, and Lincoln returns a finished design: a subject, a preheader, and editable blocks that load straight into the document editor for you to edit. Four things worth knowing before you use it:- It costs $3.00 per draft, at your organization’s own price, and you are charged only when a draft comes back ready. A draft that fails, or that comes back invalid, is never billed.
- It is not instant. Generation runs in the background and usually finishes in under two minutes. Leaving the page does not lose the draft.
- Images must already be in your email library. Add them on the Upload tab of the image picker, or at Assets > File Uploads with the Email images kind. Picking a texting image copies it into the email library for you.
- It replaces the document. If the template already has content, you are asked to confirm before the draft overwrites it.
Drafting in the dashboard
Drafting runs in the dashboard, not over the API. It is paid, asynchronous, and non-deterministic, so it stays a product feature rather than a versioned API contract: Email > Templates > Draft with Lincoln. If the wallet cannot cover the draft, generation does not start. If the balance runs out mid-generation the draft finishes failed and is not billed.The checklist
A campaign will not schedule until its checklist is clear. The single-campaign API read returns ablocked array naming exactly what is unresolved, so an
integration never has to guess:
Some items appear as warnings rather than blockers, including sunset holds,
frequency-cap holds, and warm-up ceilings. They tell you the send will reach
fewer people than the list total, without stopping it.
Test sends
Send a real message to up to 10 addresses before committing. Test sends use sample merge data so you see what a recipient sees. Every campaign requires a successful test send before it can be submitted or scheduled. There is no setting to turn this off. If you edit a campaign after its test, the test is invalidated and you need to send another one before you can submit or schedule. “Editing,” for this purpose, means changing the body or content, the subject or preheader, the sender identity, the lists, the suppression lists, or the template. Changing the name, schedule, timezone, send window, pacing, or TTL does not invalidate the test. Two more things to know: test sends are real sends and are billed at the normal per-recipient rate, and they are excluded from campaign statistics and never fire webhooks, because they are your traffic rather than your audience’s. They are also exempt from the warm-up ceiling, so a test never consumes your daily allowance.Approval
A campaign can require a sign-off before it sends. Turn on Require approval before sending in the campaign builder, which setsrequire_approval on the
campaign (false by default). This is a per-campaign choice, not an
organization-wide setting: some campaigns can require approval while others
send as soon as their test is clear.
When it’s on, the campaign needs both a current test send and an approval
before it can be submitted or scheduled. Editing the campaign after approval
invalidates the approval the same way it invalidates the test, using the same
definition of “editing” above.
Warm-up
A brand-new domain that sends 200,000 messages on its first day gets filtered, not delivered. Mailbox providers build reputation from a sending history, and no history plus sudden volume looks exactly like a compromised account. New domains ramp through a daily ceiling:
The ramp advances one step per sending day, but only if yesterday went
well. The step-up is checked each night against your own numbers, and it is
held if the previous day’s bounce rate was 2% or higher or the complaint rate
was 0.05% or higher. You are notified when a step is held. This is the point of
a ramp: a schedule that climbs regardless of results is a countdown, not a
warm-up.
A day on which the domain sent nothing does not count in either direction: it
neither advances the ramp nor holds it. Reputation is built from a sending
history, so a day with no history is no evidence. In practice this means the ten
steps are ten days of sending, not ten days on the calendar: a domain that mails
twice a week takes about five weeks to reach the top step.
Two further adjustments:
- Acquired lists ramp on half steps. Every ceiling above is halved.
- A new identity on an already-warm domain starts at step 3 (2,500) rather than at the beginning, because the reputation belongs to the domain.
Deliverability breakers
If a send is going badly, continuing makes it worse. Two breakers pause a campaign automatically:
Both are measured cumulatively across the campaign’s life, and neither is judged
until at least 500 messages have been sent, so a handful of early bounces on
a small send cannot trip them. Rates are re-evaluated on a rolling sweep. For
reference, our sending infrastructure begins suspending senders near 5% bounce
and 0.1% complaint; these thresholds sit deliberately below that.
When a breaker trips, the campaign pauses and
pause_reason records which one.
Fix the underlying problem, which is usually list quality, then resume.
A campaign that has been auto-paused twice cannot be resumed over the API.
It returns 409 EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_RESUME_REQUIRES_SUPPORT and needs a person to
look at it. There is no override, because the breaker exists precisely to stop an
integration retrying through a real deliverability problem.
For what happens to the individual addresses behind those rates, see
Bounces, complaints, and suppressions.
Frequency cap
An optional organization-level cap limits how often any one person is mailed across all your campaigns, with separate 24-hour and 7-day limits. It is off by default; turning it on suggests one message per 24 hours and three per 7 days, which you can change. When enabled, recipients already over the limit are held out of the send rather than the send being rejected, and the campaign reports how many were held. It is the cheapest protection against the most common self-inflicted deliverability wound: three committees, one shared list, one bad week. A re-permission campaign is exempt, since a message asking whether someone still wants your mail is useless if the frequency cap stops it from arriving.Sender requirements scorecard
Gmail and Yahoo publish bulk-sender requirements. The scorecard, on the sender identity page, checks your domain against them continuously so you find out before a mailbox provider tells you:- SPF passes, DKIM signs every message, and both pass together
- A DMARC policy is published, and messages align with it
- Messages are properly formatted
- Valid forward and reverse DNS, and mail sent over TLS
- Spam complaints under 0.10%
- Bounce rate under 2%
- A physical mailing address is present
- Acquired lists have been validated within the last 90 days
DMARC progression
DMARC tells mailbox providers what to do with mail that fails authentication. Starting at enforcement would bounce your own legitimate mail from any sending service you had forgotten about, so the policy moves in stages:p=none → p=quarantine at 10% → p=quarantine at 100% → p=reject
Leaving p=none requires all of the following over a 30-day window:
- 98% or better aligned pass rate
- At least 1,000 reported messages
- At least 2 independent reporting sources
none.
We generate the record; you publish it. If your root domain already has a DMARC
record we do not manage, we will not stage an edit to it and the API returns
DMARC_ROOT_DOMAIN_NOT_MANAGED. Make that change yourself.
Dedicated sending
Most senders should use shared sending, where reputation is pooled and warm from day one. A dedicated managed sending pool is worth it only at sustained high volume, where your own reputation is an asset rather than a liability. The add-on is $15.00 per month, and it needs 45 days of warm-up before it carries full volume. Plan it well ahead of an election deadline, not during one. Two conditions you may hit:POOL_ALREADY_ACTIVE means your organization already
has one and the request did nothing, and POOL_CAPACITY_EXHAUSTED means the
capacity cap has been reached and you should contact support.
Tracking
Tracking is not optional and does not need configuring. On every send:- Every link is rewritten to a tracked URL on your link domain. That includes bare URLs you pasted into the text without making them links.
- An open pixel is added, an invisible one-pixel image that loads when the message is displayed.
- A view-in-browser link is available, which renders the message as a web page for recipients whose client mangles it. The browser version does not count as an open, though its links are still tracked.
Opens are approximate
Take open rates as a trend, not a count. Two things distort them in opposite directions, and neither is fixable by any sender:- Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads the pixel for every message, whether or not the recipient looked at it, which inflates opens.
- Recipients who never load images never register an open, even after reading and acting on the message, which deflates them.
Reporting
The campaign report opens on tiles covering sent, delivered, opened, clicked, click-to-open, bounced, complaints, unsubscribed, and cost, with the corresponding rates. Below them:
CSV export builds the full recipient-level file in the background and gives
you a download link valid for seven days. Figures on the page are cached for 60
seconds.
Test sends and seed addresses are excluded from every number, though they are
still billed, because they are your traffic rather than your audience’s.
Compare campaigns puts up to four campaigns side by side, which is the
supported way to evaluate a change in subject line, sender, or creative.