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When you add a new sender, Outly automatically starts a 14-day warmup period that gradually increases your daily sending limit from 20 to 500 emails/day. This builds your sender reputation with email providers and prevents your account from being flagged.

You can skip warmup by checking "Skip warmup period" when adding a sender — but only do this if the account already has established sending history. Skipping warmup on a brand-new account risks triggering Gmail's spam filters.

Outly enforces three layers of rate limiting: per-minute, per-hour, and per-day. When any limit is reached, pending emails are automatically rescheduled with a small random delay — they're not lost.

If you're using multiple senders, Outly will automatically rotate to the next available sender. If all senders are exhausted, the campaign pauses and auto-resumes when capacity is available (checked every hour).

If a sender encounters 3 consecutive SMTP errors (e.g., connection refused, authentication failure), Outly puts it in a 5-minute cooldown. No emails are sent during cooldown to prevent further damage to your sender reputation.

After cooldown expires, sending resumes automatically. A single successful send resets the error counter. You can see cooldown status in the Throttle Status panel on the campaign detail page.

When you select multiple senders for a campaign, Outly distributes emails across them using round-robin — each sender gets roughly equal volume, respecting their individual daily limits.

During sending, if one sender hits its limit, emails are automatically reassigned to the next available sender. This lets you send higher volumes without exceeding any single account's limits.

You can add up to 5 follow-up steps to a campaign. Each step has its own subject, body, and a wait period (in days) after the previous step was sent.

The sequence scheduler runs every 15 minutes, checking which recipients are due for their next follow-up. If a recipient replies to any step, their sequence stops automatically.

When you import a CSV, the first column must be email addresses. Additional columns become template variables. For example, a CSV with columns email, name, company lets you use {{name}} and {{company}} in your subject and body.

Variables are resolved per-recipient when the campaign is created. Unmatched variables (no CSV column) are left as-is in the email. The Variable Preview panel shows you exactly what each recipient will see.

Templates are saved subject/body pairs you can reuse across campaigns — like a "cold outreach" template or a "follow-up" template. You create them in the Templates page.

Template variables ({{variable}}) are placeholders that get replaced with per-recipient data from your CSV. They work inside any email, whether you started from a template or wrote it from scratch.

10 MB per file, 25 MB total per campaign, up to 10 files. Supported formats: PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, CSV, TXT, PNG, JPG, GIF.

The 25 MB limit matches Gmail's attachment limit — exceeding it would cause emails to bounce. Files are stored in Cloudinary and downloaded by the worker at send time.

Pending emails stop being sent immediately. Emails already in the process of sending will complete. When you resume, any emails whose scheduled time has passed are rescheduled starting from now, preserving the original order and delay settings.

Your Google App Password is encrypted using AES-256-CBC with a unique random initialization vector before being stored in the database. The encryption key is a server-side secret that never leaves the server.

Credentials are only decrypted momentarily in memory when the worker needs to send an email, then discarded. They are never included in API responses, logs, or error messages.

Google App Passwords are 16-character codes that let third-party apps access your Gmail via SMTP without using your main password. Google requires them since they disabled "Less Secure App" access in 2022.

To generate one: go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords (requires 2-Step Verification enabled). Create one specifically for Outly and paste it when adding a sender.

Outly adds a tiny transparent 1x1 pixel image to each outgoing email. When the recipient's email client loads this image, the server records an open event. This is the industry-standard method used by all email marketing platforms.

Limitation: some email clients (notably Outlook desktop) block images by default, so open rates will undercount. Apple Mail Privacy Protection may inflate rates by pre-fetching images. Open rates are best used as a relative indicator, not an absolute measure.

Instead of sending emails at rigid fixed intervals (which looks robotic to email providers), Outly uses your hourly limit to compute an average gap, then randomizes each gap by ±40%. For example, with an hourly limit of 40, the average gap is 90 seconds — but actual gaps range from ~54s to ~126s randomly.

Your "Min delay" setting acts as a floor — no two emails will ever be closer than this value. The result is a natural-looking send pattern that averages out to your hourly limit over time.