Ajay Goel, Author at GMass Blog

From sending out canned responses to customizing your inbox display, Gmail offers some very powerful features that most users aren’t aware of.

These Gmail tips and tricks can make sending, reading, and managing your emails faster and easier, saving you an incredible amount of time.

In this article, I’ll share 20 useful Gmail tips and tricks to enhance your Gmail experience. I’ll also cover the ultimate productivity hack to take your Gmail productivity to new heights.

Further Reading:

If you’re a beginner with Gmail, read my post on how to use Gmail.

Also, check out my step-by-step guide on how to use Gmail Search.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links below to jump to specific sections)

20 Useful Gmail Tips and Tricks

The Ultimate Gmail Productivity Hack

Let’s get started.

20 Useful Gmail Tips and Tricks

Here are twenty Gmail tips and tricks you should know about today:

1. Unsend Emails

Ever sent an email but then realized you made a mistake after you pressed the send button?
The Gmail email service can help you when this happens, thanks to the Undo Send feature.

Gmail’s Undo Send feature lets you unsend a sent message within a short cancellation period (a maximum of 30 seconds) after clicking the Send button.

You can also adjust the cancellation time limit for unsending the message.

For this, go to Settings > See all settings > General tab > and then click on the drop down arrow next to Undo Send to select the cancellation period you prefer.

Unsent your email message because you didn’t like how you ended it?
Learn how to write a solid ending to your email message.

2. Use Smart Compose

Gmail’s Smart Compose feature is a convenient Gmail hack that recommends words/phrases to complete your sentences.

When you type out a new message in the Compose window, Gmail will try to understand your email message and predict what you want to say. Press the Tab key to accept Gmail’s suggestions, or ignore them and write your own text.

In the desktop version, you can enable Smart Compose through the General tab.

Go to Settings > See all settings > General tab and scroll to Smart Compose. Then, click the radio button next to “Writing suggestions on”.

Want Gmail to personalize suggestions based on your writing style?
Right below Smart Compose, you’ll find Smart Compose personalization.

Click the radio button next to “Personalization on” to personalize Smart Compose to your writing style. You can even provide feedback on Smart Compose suggestions to help Gmail improve its accuracy.

Want to know how to start a killer formal email without Smart Compose?
Check out my guide on how to start a formal email.

3. Use Multiple Gmail Accounts

Any Gmail user can switch between different email accounts and multiple inboxes with ease.

Essentially, you can stay logged in to multiple Gmail accounts and access Gmail from any of these multiple accounts without having to sign in each time.

But first, you’ll need to add your other Gmail account (or accounts).

To do this, click on your Gmail account avatar in the top right corner of the inbox, then click on Add another account.

Once you’ve added multiple accounts, click on your Gmail account avatar again and select the Gmail account you want to use.

The best part about this Gmail tip?
You don’t have to reenter your Gmail or Google account passwords!

4. Schedule Emails

You can’t stay online 24×7 to send out emails, right?

That’s why the email scheduling feature inside Gmail helps you plan your outgoing emails in advance!

Just type in your new message and click on the down arrow next to the Send button. Then, pick a date and time you want your email message to be sent, and Gmail will handle the rest.

This Gmail hack is also available on the Gmail mobile apps (iPhone app and Android app).

It’s pretty useful when you have recipients in different time zones or if you’re stepping out of the office and need to send some important emails across at a given time in the future.

Need help with scheduling your Gmail emails?
Read my post on how to schedule an email in Gmail using its web and mobile apps.

5. Use Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

Gmail offers several keyboard shortcuts that make email message management a lot easier on your personal computer.

To access the keyboard shortcut list, just press Shift (+)? / on your keyboard.
In the popup that appears, you’ll see every keyboard shortcut that’s enabled and every keyboard shortcut that’s turned off.

To enable keyboard shortcuts, go to Settings > See all settings > General. Then, scroll to Keyboard shortcuts and select the radio button next to “Keyboard shortcuts on”.

You also have the option to customize these keyboard shortcuts to remap keys to various actions.

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6. Send Emails from Different Email Addresses

In Gmail, you can set up all your email accounts in one inbox and send emails from different addresses while using the same inbox.

But first, you’ll need to add your other mail addresses.

To do this, go to Settings > See all settings > Accounts and Import and scroll to Send mail as. Then, click on the link Add another email address.

A popup will now appear.
In the popup, enter the name and email address you want to add.

Click Next Step > Send verification, and add your SMTP server details, username, and password for the account.

Finally, click Add Account.

You can easily change your From address in the Compose window to the email ID you want the email to show.

But wait.

How is this different from being able to use multiple Gmail accounts?
Using this Gmail hack, you can send emails from your Gmail mailbox using any email ID you own — not just Gmail accounts. For example, you can use the Gmail mailbox to send emails from your Yahoo/Outlook email addresses (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a Gmail address).

7. Organize Emails with Gmail Labels & Filters

The Gmail email service lets you organize your Gmail inbox by adding labels to your emails.

Labels are similar to tags that you add to emails to categorize them in your mailbox.

In Gmail, you can apply multiple labels to an email.
For example, you can add the labels “Sales” and “Closed” to an email. And then, you’ll find that email under both “Sales” and the “Closed” labels.

To create a new Gmail label, scroll down the left sidebar and click on Create new label. You can also create a new Gmail label by going to the Labels tab in See all settings.

Next, give your label a name.

You can even choose to nest it as a sub-label under any existing label. For example, you can create two Gmail labels — “Work” and “Marketing” — and nest the “Marketing” label under “Work” in your inbox.

You can create labels on the mobile Gmail app as well.

What if you want to categorize your emails even further?
If you want even more functionality to categorize emails, you can use Gmail filters.

The Gmail filter feature comes in handy when you want to filter emails based on specific criteria. Once you create a custom Gmail filter, you won’t have to manually sort and manage your emails.

You can access the Create filter feature by clicking the down arrow in the Gmail Search box.

Curious about the Gmail Label feature?
Check out my step-by-step guide on How to use Gmail Labels.

8. Use Gmail Templates

Want to send the same email to hundreds of recipients?
With this Gmail trick, you can!

No need to exhaust yourself by creating multiple emails and copy-pasting the same content.

With Gmail’s templates (canned responses), you can import email message templates straight into emails without copy-pasting from anywhere else. This Gmail trick will save you valuable time when handling bulk emails.

You can even import subject lines directly to your email message.

To turn on these email message templates, follow these steps:

Click on the Settings icon (gear icon) and then click See all settings.
Click on Advanced > Templates and switch it to Enable.
Click Save to save changes to your Gmail settings.

Note: Templates were originally under the Gmail Lab tab. However, Gmail has removed the Gmail Labs feature. You will now find templates under Advanced in the Settings menu.

To save your email templates:

Go to the Compose window and craft in the template you want to save.
Click on the three dots at the bottom right.
Select Templates > Save draft as template.
Give the template a name and save it.

To import a template to your email message, just follow the same steps as above, and select a saved template.

9. Customize Your Gmail Inbox Display

Don’t like your incoming messages being split into different tabs like Primary, Social, and Updates?

Gmail lets you customize your inbox display according to your tastes!

Just click on the Settings icon (gear icon) in the upper right corner above the reading pane and choose Customize under INBOX TYPE.

And when the dialog box pops up, you can choose the Gmail message categories you want in your inbox tab.

Want to see important and unread emails first?
Enable the Gmail setting for Priority Inbox — this displays all your important emails and unread emails first, starred emails second, and everything else at the bottom.

To enable priority inbox, click on the Settings icon (gear icon) on the top right. After that, scroll down and select Priority Inbox by clicking the radio button next to it.

10. Snooze Email Notifications

Nobody wants to be disturbed with one desktop notification after another every time you get an email, right?

When a Gmail user doesn’t want to reply to or check an email thread at the moment, they can activate Gmail’s Snooze feature. This will hide the email from your inbox, and it will reappear like an unread message at a time of your choice.

To snooze incoming messages, hover over an email and click the clock icon on the right. Then, choose the date and time you would like the email to pop up again.

Any emails you’ve snoozed will be stored in the Snoozed folder (which you can access from the left sidebar).

You can even create Google tasks from emails to ensure that you remember to reply to these snoozed emails.

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11. Mute and Archive Emails

Need a more permanent solution to snoozing emails?
Try to mute conversations or archive them.

When you mute an email thread, you’ll stop receiving new notifications about that specific thread. And when an email is archived, it’s removed from your inbox and stored separately.

To mute a conversation, select the email, click on the three dots, and then click on Mute.

To unmute an email thread, follow the same steps — the Mute option will now have changed to Unmute.

To archive an email, select it and click on the archive button on the right.

To find an archived email, you’ll have to open the All Mail tab from the left sidebar. To move an email back into the inbox, go to the email and select it by clicking the checkbox on the left. Then click on the Move to inbox icon below the search bar.

12. Create Calendar Events from Emails

A Gmail user can create Google Calendar events straight from their inbox.

You can also use this feature to create reminders for meetings and other important events for yourself and anyone who receives the email.

To create an event from your inbox, go to the email message from which you want to create an event.

Then, click on the three dots below the Gmail search bar, and click on Create event when the dialog box appears. A Google Calendar window will appear, and you can enter the relevant details.

13. Use Search Operators

Sorting through tons of emails to find a specific message can be challenging.

However, when you use Google’s email client, you can streamline this process with search operators.

Here are a few handy search operators you can use in the Gmail search box:

“Size:xm” (replace x with a number) — if you type “size:5m” in the Gmail search bar, every Gmail message that is over 5MB will appear.
“+” (the plus-sign) — search for an exact word in your inbox. For example, typing in “+watch” will return every mention of “watch” in your inbox.
“older_than:xd” (replace x with a number) — see emails older than x number of days. It’s helpful to filter out and delete old emails.
“Is:chat” — see chat messages from Google apps like Google Chat.

Note: Google Meet and Google Chat have replaced the Hangouts messaging app, so your messages will be transferred to Chat.

14. Block Spammers

Everyone has a spam messages folder full of unwanted emails, right?

While you can just let the unwanted emails and spam messages be, spam unreads will continue to pile up until Gmail deletes them after 30 days. And having a massive spam folder can reduce your available Gmail storage space.

Fortunately, you can easily block spammers, so they can’t send you any new emails.

Just go to your Spam messages folder, select an email message of the sender you want to block, and click on the three dots icon on the right.

Then, click on Block “(Name)”.

15. Use Gmail Offline

Gmail allows you to read, search, and reply to emails even when there’s no internet connection. But to use this functionality, you’ll need the Chrome browser.

You can enable offline Gmail by going to Gmail Settings > See all settings > Offline tab.

Click on Enable offline mail and choose your settings, how many days of emails you want to sync, and your security options.

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16. Send Confidential Emails

Are you sending sensitive information via emails?
With Gmail’s Confidential Mode, you won’t have to worry about it getting into the wrong hands!

To send a confidential message, open a new Compose window and type your email. At the bottom, click on the lock icon and set the expiration date for the email.

You can grant access to the email through a passcode sent to the recipient via SMS or email. The recipient won’t have the option to copy, print, forward, or download the email.

Note: In confidential mode, both the email and any attachments will be deleted at the moment of expiration.

Thinking of using BCC to protect your recipients’ privacy?
Check out this article on how you should or should not use BCC in email.

17. Organize Your Tasks

Did you know that Gmail has a built-in Task organizer to organize your tasks easily?

Rather than relying on your memory and risk forgetting an important task, having a to-do list that you can tick off as you complete tasks can be a life-saver.

And that’s what you get with Gmail’s built-in list maker. It helps keep your emails and your tasks in sync.

To access your tasks, click on the Tasks icon (a blue circle and checkmark) on the far right panel of your Gmail mailbox.

You can now add and mark off your to-do tasks.

Note: If the Task icon is not visible, click the small arrow at the bottom right corner of your Gmail window, and the control panel will appear.

18. Unsubscribe From Newsletters and Junk Mail

What do you do when your email is filled with more newsletters and junk mail than relevant messages?

Sure, you can unsubscribe to each newsletter individually by clicking the Unsubscribe link (next to the sender’s name at the top of the email).

But how do you locate all these messages without going through every email in each mailbox?
For a simpler way of unsubscribing, go to Gmail Search and type unsubscribe. A list of every message containing the word “unsubscribe” will appear.

You can then go through these emails and click the unsubscribe link.

19. Check Which Apps Have Access to Your Account

Linking frequently used apps to Gmail can be a time-saver, but you should review the list of apps with access to your Google account regularly.

Why?
Because these apps may have access to personal and sensitive data such as:

Contact info.
Banking details.
Address data.

If this data were to get leaked, you’d be exposed to a major security risk.

To see which third party tool (or tools) has access to your Google account, go to myaccount.google.com/Security.

Scroll down to the Third-party apps with account access section and click Manage third-party accounts you’ve linked to Google to disconnect any third party tool you don’t use anymore.

20. Make Video Calls

My last Gmail tip is handy if you have an urgent or important message that you want to convey face-to-face. It’s also useful if you don’t want to keep signing in to Zoom or some other video calling app.

You can make face-to-face video calls from Gmail using Google Chat.

But first, you’ll need to give Google access to your device’s camera and microphone.

Here’s how:

Open Google Chat.
Click Video call.
A message will appear at the top of the video call window.
Click Allow.

Then, you can go ahead and make video calls using Google Chat:

Click on the Apps icon in the top right corner.
Click on the Chat icon.

A new window will open.
From your contacts, select who you want to video call.
Click on the Camera icon.

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Each hack I mentioned here can be incredibly handy. However, to really amp up Gmail’s capabilities, you’ll need a powerful Gmail extension like GMass.

The Ultimate Gmail Productivity Hack: GMass

GMass is a powerful email outreach tool that works within Gmail. It’s used by employees of tech companies like Uber, Google, and even social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s also perfect for SMBs, solopreneurs, churches, and individuals looking to send out emails.

With GMass, you’ll be able to:

Easily schedule and send out multiple emails from the Gmail app on the web or using the GMass add-on for Gmail’s Android app.
Automatically personalize emails to increase email engagement levels, including paragraphs, images, links, and attachments.
Track open rates, click rates, and other recipient interactions in real-time using GMass’ Campaign Reports.
Automate follow-ups to ensure high response rates from email recipients.
Use Google Sheets to set up mail merges easily.
Send behavior-based campaigns based on what actions your leads take in your previous or initial email.
See who your most interested prospects are with a sentiment score for each reply you’ve received.
A/B test your email outreach campaigns to ensure you’re sending the message likely to get the best response.
Use the Gate feature to combine automatic personalization, sentiment analysis, and template capabilities to send automatically personalized “replies to replies”.

And the best part?
Anyone can use GMass — all you have to do is download the GMass Chrome extension, sign up, and you’re ready to go!

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Wrapping Up

Now you know the twenty best Gmail tips and tricks that you can actually benefit from when you use Gmail.

And when used in conjunction with a powerful tool like GMass, these tips can really help you take your email workflow to the next level — especially if you manage a business.

Then why not download the GMass Chrome extension to get started today?

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?

Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Searching for a detailed GetResponse review?

GetResponse is a comprehensive email marketing tool that also helps businesses grow their audience. Apart from basic email marketing features, it also offers marketing automation and landing page design tools.

However, GetResponse might not suit everyone’s email marketing needs.

In this comprehensive GetResponse review, I’ll highlight everything you need to know to determine if it’s the right tool for you.

I’ll talk about GetResponse’s features, pricing, and the limitations you need to look for in the marketing automation tool. And if you’re looking for a simpler email tool, I’ll highlight the perfect alternative for you.

This GetResponse Review Contains:

What is GetResponse?
Five Key Features of GetResponse
GetResponse Pricing
Three Limitations of GetResponse
A More Streamlined and Simpler GetResponse Alternative

Let’s dive into it.

What is GetResponse?

GetResponse is an email marketing platform designed for lead generation and online sales. Its features are built for organizations looking to implement high-impact marketing campaigns to drive up their ROI.

Some of the most important GetResponse features include marketing automation, email templates, landing page creator, and an autoresponder. (I’ll dive into these in detail in a minute.)

GetResponse also allows users to run social media marketing campaign sessions on Facebook and host webinars on the platform.

It also has a mobile app that allows Android and iOS users to manage their email marketing campaigns on-the-go.

Five Key Features of GetResponse

Let’s take a look at some features that make GetResponse a great online marketing tool:

1. GetResponse Autoresponder

When you’re running a business and dealing with hundreds of leads, it’s impossible to send marketing emails manually.

Fortunately, GetResponse has comprehensive autoresponder software to help you send automated email sequences to convert prospects easily.

You can use this GetResponse feature to design emails with drag-and-drop blocks or predefined templates that match your marketing campaign goals. There are hundreds of templates that fit different occasions — so you can easily connect with prospects and customers.

You can add videos, social media icons, and buttons — and even optimize them to look great on any mobile device.

You can set delivery times based on subscriptions and send emails with delays to get higher open rates. GetResponse also allows you to analyze how your autoresponder emails perform so that you can tweak future emails to improve open and click-through rates.

Ajay’s email tip

While drag-and-drop email designers and prebuilt templates can help you compose beautiful emails, looks aren’t everything. Make sure the rest of the tools and features of any email service or software help your business run smoothly and support your goals.

Read my guide on how to start an email to create stunning openings for all of your emails.

2. Easy-to-Use Automation

One of GetResponse’s key selling points is its marketing automation feature.

An automated workflow helps you send autoresponder emails based on a predetermined sequence. You can build automation workflows that trigger based on users’ behavior, too — like sending automated emails to a new subscriber and offering them discounts on their first purchase.

GetResponse users can utilize pre-built automation sequences or create custom workflows to save time.

You can even use the automation feature to create personalized emails by gathering customer data through your site’s interactions. This helps you build better connections with your audience.

3. Email Analytics

GetResponse provides its users with email analytics to help them understand how their email campaigns are doing.

These analytics will help you better understand your subscribers and determine what resonates with them. You can also use it to learn which emails led to website visits, sales, and signups.

With their analytics, you can:

Analyze open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), number of unsubscribes, and sales
Monitor mobile vs. desktop performance
Conduct A/B tests on subject lines and tweak emails based on their performance

What’s A/B testing?

With A/B testing (also known as split testing), you send one version of an email to one set of recipients and a variation of the same email to another group of recipients. Then, you analyze the results of those two email tests to see which one performed better. The email with the best performance is the version you send to the rest of your email list.

4. Conversion Funnel (Autofunnel)

With GetResponse’s Conversion Funnel tool (previously known as Autofunnel), you get access to an automated and ready-made lead funnel creator.

You can use four types of funnels:

Simple opt-in funnels for lead generation
Sales funnel that helps you promote, sell, and deliver your products
Webinar funnels to help you build and nurture relationships
Lead-magnet funnels that allow you to share valuable content in exchange for email addresses

5. Webinar Hosting

Want to reach more people and provide value to them?

Just host a webinar to show how your business can solve your participants’ problems!

GetResponse has webinar software that helps you broadcast to as many as 1,000 live attendees.

You can also share the stage with two other presenters and store up to 20 hours of recordings in the cloud.

With the GetResponse webinar feature, you can:

Create an unlimited number of recordings
Customize webinar URLs
Manage user registrations
Set subscription settings for attendees

What’s more…

You can use GetResponse’s built-in marketing tools to promote your webinar to your email list. For example, you can target your Facebook page visitors with relevant details about your webinar.

GetResponse Pricing

Now that I’ve covered GetResponse’s essential features, let me answer some questions about its price:

1. Is GetResponse Free?

No, GetResponse doesn’t offer a free plan for users.

However, you can try a 30-day free trial on each of their plans — without a credit card.

2. How Much Does GetResponse Cost?

GetResponse currently offers four plans for users: Basic, Plus, Professional, and Max.

Each plan’s pricing depends on your contact list size — with the minimum number being 1,000 contacts.

A. GetResponse Pricing for the “Basic” Plan

This pricing plan starts at $15/month with support for 1,000 contacts and includes:

Email marketing
Autoresponder
Unlimited automation templates
Unlimited landing pages with the landing page creator
Mobile app access
Customer support via live chat
One sales funnel
Facebook Ads
Unlimited lead generation funnels

B. GetResponse Pricing for the “Plus” Plan

This GetResponse plan starts at $49/month with support for 1,000 contacts and includes:

Everything in the Basic plan
Support for three users
Automation builder with support for five automated workflows
Five sales funnels
Live webinar support for five attendees
Landing page creator
GetResponse contact scoring & tagging
Five webinar funnels

C. GetResponse Pricing for the “Professional” Plan

This pricing plan starts at $99/month with support for 1,000 contacts and includes:

Everything in the Plus pricing plan
Support for five users
Web push notifications
Unlimited automation builder
Support for paid webinars with up to 300 attendees
Landing page builder
On-demand live webinar support
Unlimited webinar funnel support
Unlimited sales funnels

D. GetResponse Pricing for the “Max” Plan

This is an enterprise plan with custom pricing — you’ll have to contact GetResponse for a quote.

It includes:

Everything in the Professional plan
Dedicated customer support
Support for transactional emails (paid add-on)
Dedicated IP address
GetResponse integration with Microsoft Dynamics
Landing page creator
Live webinar support for 500 attendees
Deliverability and email campaign consulting

Three Limitations of GetResponse

Now that I’ve covered the GetResponse pros and pricing, let’s check out some of its significant limitations:

1. No Free Plan

With a GetResponse account, you’ll get access to a wide range of digital marketing tools — but all of them come at a cost.

You can always go for the 30-day free trial, but it’s not long enough to see how the GetResponse platform can help your business. If you’re serious about using GetResponse, you’ll have to subscribe to a paid plan.

That’s not the worst part.

Even if you run a small business with only four people or so on your marketing team, you’ll still have to go for the “Professional” plan, which costs $99/month.

And if you have a contact list of around 5,000 people (as many small businesses have), your cost goes up to $139/month!

2. Email Templates Look Outdated

You can’t use outdated email templates for your marketing campaign, right?

With a GetResponse campaign, that could be an issue.

Sure, GetResponse offers hundreds of templates.

However, they often need a lot of manual customization to suit modern email marketing needs.

And while they are rolling out a newer version of GetResponse with better templates, it still has limited customizability.

So if you want an email that doesn’t look dated, you’re better off designing the email yourself — instead of relying on GetResponse’s pre-built templates.

3. Can Be Difficult to Use

While most of GetResponse’s UI is pretty straightforward, some features, like the GetResponse landing page and contact form designer, can be challenging to use.

Several user reviews point out that it doesn’t feel as user-friendly as the rest of the GetResponse UI.

A More Streamlined GetResponse Alternative: GMass

While GetResponse offers various features, it may not be the right tool for everyone.

After all, it lacks a free plan, and the user experience can vary depending on the features you use.

What you need is a more straightforward, no-nonsense email marketing tool that can help you:

Schedule email campaigns
Automatically personalize emails
Follow-up on emails with ease
Achieve a high deliverability rate
And measure email campaign performance

Basically, what you need is GMass!

What is GMass?

GMass is a powerful email tool that works entirely inside Gmail. Its outreach features have made it a popular tool used by employees from tech giants like Uber and Google, and social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

GMass is also perfect for SMBs, individuals, and institutions like churches that need to send email campaigns through Gmail, too.

You can use GMass to:

Schedule and send email campaigns
Personalize emails automatically to increase recipient engagement
Keep track of essential email metrics
Automate all of your email follow-ups
Set up custom tracking domains to improve email deliverability

You can even use GMass as an add-on to the official Gmail app.

But the best part?

Just add the Chrome extension to your browser, and you’re good to go!

What Makes GMass the Perfect GetResponse Alternative?

Let’s take a look at why GMass is the perfect alternative to GetResponse:

1. Automatically Personalize Emails

Did you know that recipients are more likely to interact with personalized emails?

With GMass, you can automatically personalize every individual email in a campaign so that recipients feel like it was tailor-made for them.

GMass can automatically add customized text, images, and links, and pull a recipient’s name from their email address.

2. Keep Track of Important Email Analytics

Whenever you send an email campaign with GMass, it generates a Campaign Report that highlights core email metrics like:

No. of unique opens
No. of unsubscribes
No. of replies
No. of unique clicks on a link
And more

You can quickly access this report from the Campaigns tab on Gmail’s left sidebar.

3. Easily Automate Follow-Ups

Generally, most recipients don’t interact with the first email you send them.

So it’s essential to send follow-ups.

GMass helps you automate these follow-ups to reach recipients at the perfect time and boost your engagement.

You can even customize these follow-ups — like the email content, how many follow-ups to send, and the time gap between follow-ups.

4. Connect Google Sheets for Quick Mail Merging

You can’t manually insert email addresses for a massive email campaign, right?

GMass lets you link a Google Sheet to handle mail merges easily. It will automatically add all the email addresses in the Google Sheet to the email — without you having to do a thing!

5. Easily Schedule Emails

Can’t stay up to send emails at the right time?

Just let GMass handle it!

All you have to do is create the email, schedule it, and GMass takes care of the rest.

Want to reschedule an email?

Just head to the Drafts folder in Gmail and change the date and time to your new timing.

Wrapping Up

It’s clear that GetResponse has tons of features that make it an all-in-one online marketing tool.

But that doesn’t make it perfect.

If you really need all the features offered with GetResponse, you can give it a trial run before buying a plan.

However, if you’re looking for a comprehensive and straightforward email marketing solution, look no further than GMass. It offers advanced functionality and is super easy to use — making it the perfect email marketing tool.

So why not give GMass a try and see how it helps you boost your email campaigns immediately?

And remember, GMass isn’t just the perfect GetResponse alternative. Check out how it’s also the perfect alternative to all these other marketing tools:

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews

Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

It’s important to personalize your emails. Now you can hyper-personalize your outreach emails with conditional content using simple If/Then statements in the Subject and Body of your message. Do you have to be a programmer to do this? No! We make inserting conditional content fairly easy. Use one of our copy/paste recipes and modify to your tastes. Let’s get started.

How do you use conditional content?

Just type two left curly brackets for the conditional code menu to appear.

Conditional content blocks can be placed in the Subject and Message inside a set of double curly brackets, like so:

{{...code...}}

You can mix regular merge tags, which use a single set of curly brackets, with conditional code blocks, so:

Hi {FirstName},

{{...code...}}

In the Gmail Compose box’s Subject and Message areas, just type a single left curly bracket to see the regular merge tag menu and type two left curly brackets to see the conditional content menu. The conditional content menu gives you sample shorthand If/Then statements for each variable in your campaign. Of course you’ll want to customize the statement from there.

What statements can you use?

Let’s say you have a column in your Google Sheet called Industry that identifies the industry that each of your email prospects works in.

Our conditional content feature supports a bunch of statements, but the most useful will be the If/Then statement. Here’s an example.

Basic If/Then statement:

{{If Industry="Recruiting" Then}}

{FirstName}, hope the recruiting business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates!

{{End If}}

{{If Industry="Sales" Then}}

{FirstName}, hope your sales are high and you're closing deals left and right!

{{End If}}

{{If Industry="Other" Then}}

{FirstName}, hope things are going well for you.

{{End If}}

Basic If/Then/Else:

A better way to do the above is to use an ELSE block.

{{If Industry="Recruiting" Then}}

{FirstName}, hope the recruiting business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates!

{{Else If Industry="Other" Then}}

{FirstName}, hope your sales are high and you're closing deals left and right!

{{Else}}

{FirstName}, hope things are going well for you.

{{End If}}

In the above examples, I’m outputting text to my email based on the Industry column of my spreadsheet. Additionally, I’m using a regular “FirstName” merge tag in each of the code blocks.

Using comparative operators

If your Google Sheet has columns with numerical data, then you can use those to set content based on conditions. For example if your CRM system has a field called DaysSinceLastContact and you export from your CRM system to a Google Sheet, you might do this:

{{If CInt(DaysSinceLastContact) &gt; 30 Then}}

It's been a long while...{DaysSinceLastContact} days since we talked!

{{Else}}

Hope I'm not annoying you with all my outreach!

{{End If}}

In the above example, it’s important to surround DaysSinceLastContact with the CInt command, which converts the column to an integer type, so that it can be properly compared to the integer 30. Without CInt, it would be compared as a string, and would yield different results.

Let’s say you have a column called LastPurchaseDate where you track the last time a customer purchased from you. You might want to vary some text based on how long ago your customer last purchased.

{{If CDate(LastPurchaseDate) &gt; CDate("1/1/20") Then}}

Thanks for supporting us with a purchase during this year of the pandemic. You last purchased on {LastPurchaseDate}.

{{Else}}

It's been a while since we've heard from you. Can we help you with your next purchase?

{{End If}}

Note the use of the CDate operator. That makes sure that both values are treated as dates and compared as dates. If you’re a programmer, just like with integers you know that comparing dates as dates is important, as opposed to comparing dates as strings.

Shorthand for If/Then statements:

There’s a shorthand you can use for If/Then statements that goes like this:

{{ IfThenElse(condition, true result, false result) }}

Here’s an example:

{{ IfThenElse(DaysSinceLastContact &gt; 30, "It's been a while...", "Hope I'm not annoying you...") }}

In this example, if DaysSinceLastContact is greater than 30, then “It’s been a while…” is used, otherwise “Hope I’m not annoying you…” is used.

Using boolean logic

You can combine conditions with AND, OR, and parentheses.

Example using OR:

 
{{If Industry="Recruiting" OR Industry="HeadHunting" Then}} 
{FirstName}, hope your business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates!
{{End If}}

Example using AND:

{{If CDate(LastPurchaseDate) &gt;= CDate("1/1/20") AND CDate(LastPurchaseDate) &lt;= CDate("12/31/20") Then}}

Thanks for supporting us with a purchase during 2020, the year of the pandemic. You last purchased on {LastPurchaseDate}.

{{Else}}

It's been a while since we've heard from you. Can we help you with your next purchase?

{{End If}}

Example combining conditions using parentheses:

 
{{If (Industry="Recruiting" OR Industry="HeadHunting") AND CDate(LastPurchase) &gt;= CDate("1/1/20") Then}} 
{FirstName}, hope your people business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates! Also thanks for your business in 2020.
{{Else}}
It's been a while! Can I help you with anything in your business?
{{End If}}

Randomize text using the “spin” command:

You can also randomize text, based on a set of variations. Let’s say you want to provide a random greeting for each of your email recipients:

{{spin}}
Hey there!
{{variation}}
Hello there!
{{variation}}
Hi there friend!
{{end spin}}

Three Easy and Practical Examples

Example One: Getting rid of the annoying space in greetings

One of the personalization dilemmas every seasoned email marketer experiences at some point in their careers is dealing with the extra “space” in the greeting when you don’t know a prospect’s first name. Let’s say your email list contains first names for half of your email addresses only. You want your email to begin:

Hey {FirstName},

for those people where you know the first name, but just:

Hey,

for those whose first names you don’t know.

If you compose your campaign with “Hey {FirstName},” then for the recipients that don’t have first names will see:

Hey ,

and now you see the problem. There’s that extra space before the comma. Conditional content solves this problem easily:

{{ IfThenElse(FirstName != "", "Hey {FirstName},", "Hey,") }}

What this code block does says is, if the first name isn’t blank, then output “Hey {FirstName},”, and if it is blank then use “Hey,”. Problem solved, no extra annoying space.

Example Two: Greet people in their own language

If you know the country of each of your email list recipients, it’s easy to output the greeting in their primary language. For example, if you have a Country column in your Google Sheet, you can do this:

{{If Country="USA" Then}}

Good day!

{{Else If Country="France" Then}}

Bonjour!

{{Else if Country="Germany" Then}}

Guten Tag!

{{Else If Country="India" Then}}

Namaste!

{{Else}}

Hi!

{{End If}}

But what if you don’t know the country for each prospect? You can still greet people in their primary language by looking for a country designation within the email address. For example, we know that [email protected] is a United Kingdom address, and we know that [email protected] is a Russian address. So with the magic of conditional content, we can do this:

{{If Right(EmailAddress, 3) = ".fr" Then}}

Bonjour!

{{Else If Right(EmailAddress, 3) = ".de" Then}}

Guten Tag!

{{Else If Right(EmailAddress, 3) = ".in" Then}}

Namaste!

{{Else}}

Hi!

{{End If}}

Here I’m using the Right command to examine the three rightmost characters of the EmailAddress value to determine if it’s a country-specific address. You can also parse string values with the Left command the the Contains command. A flawed version of the above sample looks like this:

{{If Contains(EmailAddress, ".fr) Then}}

Bonjour!

{{Else If Contains(EmailAddress, ".de) Then}}

Guten Tag!

{{Else If Contains(EmailAddress, ".in) Then}}

Namaste!

{{Else}}

Hi!

{{End If}}

Why is this version flawed? Because it’s not enough to check whether an email address simply contains “.fr” because the address [email protected] contains “.fr” but is not a French address. It’s important to look at the rightmost characters, not just check whether the email address contains the characters.

Example 3: A SaaS platform emailing both free and paid users

As the creator of GMass, I send out an email announcement to all of my users whenever there’s a hot new feature I’ve just launched, like this one, ahem ahem. Now I can vary my opening line based on whether the user is a freemium user or a paid subscriber.

Let’s say I have a column in my spreadsheet called AccountType that is either “free” or “paid”.

Hey {FirstName},

{{If AccountType="free" Then}}

As a freemium user, we're happy to add awesome new features to our platform all the time. We do hope that you'll find value to your life with our SaaS platform and encourage you to subscribe.

{{Else}}

Thank you for being a paying subscriber and supporting our SaaS platform. We use the money you pay us to build awesome new feautres like this one.

{{End If}}

I used logic similar to this when I announced this feature to the entire GMass user base. See the exact email template I used.

Gmail might mangle your code, but that’s okay!

When you write your script in the Gmail Compose, if you look at the HTML that’s created behind the scenes, you’ll notice that elements of your code are turned into HTML entities. For example, if in my Compose window I have:

{{ If CDate(LastPurchase) &gt; CDate("1/1/20") Then}}
Thanks for your purchase this year!
{{ End If }}

If I look at the HTML behind the Compose, I’ll see this:

conditional HTML behind email compose window — The > symbol has turned into >

Notice how the “greater than” sign has turned into the HTML entity > instead of just the > symbol. GMass knows to look for those and treat them as their encoded equivalent, so you don’t have to worry that those aren’t actual double quotes. This is the benefit of building this feature from scratch with our own custom compiler.

Testing your script before you send

The easiest way to test your script to make sure your syntax is correct and your logic is correct is to:

Set your campaign to Create Drafts
Enter a few addresses that will have varying conditions in the “Send Test” box
Click “Send Test Email”

The easiest way to test your conditional logic code is to set your campaign to Create Drafts and then use the “Send Test” button.

By doing this, DRAFTS will be created for each address entered. You can use addresses from your actual list that represent different conditions and you can avoid having to use your own addresses to test what the final email will look like, since no actual emails will be sent when testing this way. Remember to set your campaign back to “Send emails” when you’re done testing.

Another way is to create a separate Worksheet in your Google Sheet containing just sample rows using test addresses that you own and then sending a test to the addresses in that Worksheet prior to sending to your full list.

Avoid spaces in variables

In our document on using Google Sheets, in the section on formatting we recommend that column headings contain only alphanumeric characters and no spaces. That means using column headings like “FirstName” rather than “First Name” or “First-Name’. This is to ensure the highest accuracy with personalization as possible. Spaces and non-alphanumeric characters introduce edge cases which can cause unexpected results. For example, if you use “First Name”, and then when you use the merge tag {First Name}, the two words end up getting split onto two different lines, that will break personalization.

Sometimes, however, avoiding a space or non-alphanumeric character isn’t possible and for those situations, you should wrap your variable name in the VAR command. GMass intelligently deciphers first names from email addresses and puts those first names in a variable called auto-first so you can have “Dear {auto-first}” in your email. But to use that variable in conditional logic requires the use of the VAR command because of the hyphen in the variable name.

This will NOT work.

{{ If auto-first != "" Then}}
I believe your first name is {auto-first}
{{ Else }}
I know your email address is {EmailAddress}, but I couldn't figure out your first name.
{{ End If }}

But this WILL work.

{{ If var("auto-first") != "" Then}}
I believe your first name is {auto-first}
{{ Else }}
I know your email address is {EmailAddress}, but I couldn't figure out your first name.
{{ End If }}

Error handling

It’s easy to make a mistake when writing conditional code. When you go to send your campaign, if an individual email that’s part of the campaign encounters an error, that email recipient will be skipped and the campaign will continue sending. If you have a syntax error in your scripting, then all emails in the campaign will fail. When 10 consecutive emails error out, then the whole campaign will stop.

You are notified in all cases of any errors in your conditional scripting.

Here are the most common errors.

1. Forgetting the closing {{End If}}

{{If Industry="Recruiting" Then}}
Hope the recruiting business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates! [There is no "End If" block]
Let's set up a call to catch up. When is good for you?

2. Forgetting to begin/end all code blocks with double braces

{{If Industry="Recruiting" Then}}
Hope the recruiting business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates!
{{End If} [The ending block has only one curly bracket instead of two.]
Let's set up a call to catch up.
When is good for you?

3. Forgetting the keyword “Then”

{{If Industry="Recruiting"}} [The word "Then" is missing]
Hope the recruiting business is going well and you're placing lots of candidates!
{{End If}
Let's set up a call to catch up.
When is good for you?

The philosophy behind this feature

In building our conditional content feature, we wrote our own compiler and mimicked an old deprecated Microsoft language called VBScript for the commands and syntax. VBScript used to be one of the easiest languages for beginning programmers to learn, and while it isn’t used widely today, its syntax and logic make it the perfect email scripting language given its ease of use.

We also analyzed the conditional content feature of a few other email platforms like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Lemlist, and found weaknesses in each, so we decided to build something better. I hope you think we succeeded in that mission.

Compatibility with other systems

We’ve specifically chosen the syntax of one curly bracket for mail merge variable substitution and two curly braces for conditional logic to avoid confusion for users who want to personalize with simple mail merge variables and not be bothered with seeing code show up when designing their personalization schemes in email campaigns. This presents a challenge, however, because many other email service providers use the double curly braces syntax for regular old mail merge variable substitution. In Mixmax for example, if you want to personalize with a variable called “firstname”, you would write:

Many users copy/paste their email templates from other systems into GMass, and include variables surrounded by double curly braces. To prevent “breaking” these templates, GMass will attempt to determine if the syntax inside double curly braces is truly conditional logic or is just a mail merge variable and will treat each scenario appropriately.

Other personalization options

Conditional content is just one of the many, and the most sophisticated, ways of personalizing your email campaigns. For regular old merge tag substitution personalization, see our guide to personalization. Earlier, I mentioned how you can solve the annoying “space” issue when you don’t have someone’s first name, but we also provide a way of auto detecting first names. For our full set of personalization documentation see the personalization category page on this blog.

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?

GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.

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Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Curious about spam emails and how to stop them?

Spam emails are unsolicited messages sent to a recipient who hasn’t agreed to receive them. They’re usually sent as bulk emails and contain advertising or malicious content.

In this article, I’ll explain what spam emails are, why they’re bad for you, and how they reach your inbox. This guide will also help you understand how to stop spam emails.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to a specific section.)

What Is Spam Email?
- How a Spammer Finds Your Address
- Why Unwanted Email Is Bad for You
How to Stop Junk Emails: 5 Easy Ways
How to Stop Spam in Gmail
How to Stop Spam in Outlook
How to Spot Unwanted Emails: 8 Different Types

Let’s jump right into it.

What Is Spam Email?

Spam emails (aka “junk” emails) are unwanted messages sent to people who haven’t agreed to receive them.

These emails are generally promotional emails used by advertisers to promote products or services to customers who haven’t agreed to receive those emails.

Additionally, cybercriminals use unsolicited emails for fraudulent reasons like scamming money or delivering email viruses.

For example, you might receive an email announcing that you just won $100,000. To get paid, all you must do is deposit some money to an account as a bank transfer fee, which is most likely a trick to scam you out of some cash.

How a Spammer Finds Your Email Address

I know what you’re thinking: how does someone like this find your email address in the first place?

It’s not like you’re out there trying to get them to notice you, right?

Well, they find your email addresses in different ways:

They can use email address extractor software to harvest email addresses by looking for email IDs published on websites or social media channels.
A company that to which you have subscribed may have sold your email addresses to without your knowledge.
You’re one of many victims in a mass data leak, and a your email address was taken from that information supply.
Your email address was stolen from a colleague’s or friend’s contact or email list.

Why Unwanted Email Is Bad for You

Here are three reasons why unwanted emails are bad for you:

1. They Clutter Your Inbox

It’s already hard enough to stay on top of the relevant emails from colleagues and services to which you subscribe. Adding unwanted emails into the mix just makes things worse because you’ll have tons of irrelevant emails to sort through each day.

This can result in you missing out on important conversations — it affects how quickly you respond to important emails.

2. They Are Dangerous

An unsolicited email isn’t just something that clutters your inbox and leaves you feeling frustrated.

It is also a method that cybercriminals use to spread malware.

For example, let’s say you receive an email claiming to contain confidential information, and it comes with a file attachment.

If you were to download any attachments from unknown senders that might be malicious, they could install Trojan horses on your system. From stealing sensitive information to damaging your computer, these viruses can cause several serious problems for innocent recipients.

3. They’re Difficult to Eliminate

Mailbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail try to reduce junk mail with email security measures like spam filters. They usually check where such emails come from, what the email subject is, and how many people receive the same mail.

Read more about spam filters here.

Additionally, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) might set up traps to bait any domain, mail server, or IP address that sends suspicious emails or phishing emails. They later add these addresses to a list of blocked senders.

However, even with all these measures in place, a spammer or blocked sender can always come up with new methods and tactics to invade inboxes.

It’s one of the reasons we all still receive unsolicited junk email!

That’s why once you start receiving unwanted email, it’s very hard to get rid of it.

How to Stop Junk Emails: 5 Easy Ways

Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to stop undesirable emails.

Why?

Because promoters and others are resilient and keep coming up with new ways to get into your inbox.

Funnily enough, Bill Gates once predicted that all spam would be eliminated in 2006, and yet here we are in 2021 — still facing the same issue!

But don’t worry, there are some strategies to help you limit the number of unpermissioned emails you receive:

1. Don’t Respond

If you suspect an incoming email from a sender is not something you authorized, try not to open it.

And even if you do, don’t respond to it. Ever.

Opening a unwanted email could trigger tracking pixels embedded in the email, which tell the spammer your email account is active — making you a potential target for more unauthorized emails.

Additionally, never click on a link or button, or download any attachments inside a junk email.

If the suspicious message looks like it came from one of your contacts, or a friend, immediately take action by sending them a notification — alert them that identity theft has occurred, and their account could be compromised.

2. Train Your Email Filters

You can also report or mark emails as junk or phishing when you receive them.

This way, you’re training your email client’s filter to do a better job recognizing future email messages that could be spam.

Sometimes important emails might end up in the junk folder as a result of this.

In such cases, you can open the email and specify that it isn’t junk.

This ensures that legitimate emails from that sender address can still make it to your inbox.

Skip ahead to learn how to report unwanted email and mark legitimate emails in Gmail and Outlook.

3. Keep Your Email Addresses Private

People can’t send you unsolicited emails if they don’t know your email address.

So try to keep your mail addresses private.

Don’t post them publicly on social networking sites, online forums, chat rooms, or web pages.

But what if you’re running a business?

You can’t keep your email address all to yourself, right?

Sometimes you’ll have to provide your email address to companies so that potential customers can reach you easily. In situations like these, it’s better to give them your business email address while keeping your personal account protected.

This ensures that your primary email addresses remain private, and you can maintain a clean email inbox.

4. Use an Alternate Email Address

When you’re browsing the web, you might subscribe to a few products, services, or blogs.

And that’s okay; it’s part of the modern online experience.

However, you can’t always know for sure if the website/service you’re signing up for won’t share your email IDs with unauthorized senders.

An excellent option is to use an alternate or secondary email address for online activities and use your primary email address only for things that truly matter to you — like any services you use on a regular basis.

This way, you get to route unwanted emails to a disposable email address while keeping your primary email account’s inbox free from clutter.

5. Use Anti-Spam Solutions

You can always go for a third-party filter that specializes in blocking emails the appear unsolicited, suspicious, or dangerous.

Use these for protection and junk mail filtering when built-in filters just aren’t enough.

This additional layer of protection prevents unwanted mail from getting into your inbox using a set of protocols that help determine what messages and junk or unsolicited.

Such software can also:

Block malicious email communications.
Help quarantine unwanted emails.
Create a personalized whitelist of select approved senders.
Execute automatic updates to counter new types of harmful email and malware.

Some popular software solutions are Comodo Dome Antispam and Zerospam.

How to Stop Spam in Gmail

Here’s how you can report unsolicited emails from your Gmail inbox:

Step 1

Open gmail.com and sign in to the Gmail account with your login credentials.

Step 2

Click on the checkbox next to the email you didn’t solicit or authorize.

Step 3

Now click the exclamation-mark icon to report suspicious email.

Step 4

From the dialogue box that opens, choose to Report spam or report and unsubscribe (to block future messages from this particular sender).

The unsolicited mail will now be moved from your inbox to the junk folder.

If you want to, you can also delete emails from the junk folder. They’ll then end up in Gmail’s Trash folder, from which the mail provider will permanently delete them in 30 days.

How to Mark an Email as Not Spam in Gmail

Sometimes your email filter will put a legitimate email into your junk mail folder. Here’s how you can mark that mail as okay and train Gmail to put it in your inbox.

Step 1

Click the Spam folder from the left-hand menu.

Step 2

Click on the checkbox next to the mail that was incorrectly sent to this folder.

Step 3

Now click the Not spam button on the top to mark this mail as wanted.

The mail will then be moved to your inbox.

How to Stop Spam in Outlook

Step 1

Open outlook.com and sign in to your Outlook account with your login credentials.

Step 2

Select the message(s) you want to tag as junk or block from your inbox.

To Mark as Junk
- At the top of the screen, select Junk > Junk (or Spam > Spam) to move the message to your Junk or Spam folder. (See following screenshot.)
Or, to Block from Your Inbox
- From the top toolbar, select Junk > Block (or Spam > Block). (See following screenshot.)
- Select OK.

The messages you select will be deleted and all future messages will be blocked from your mailbox.

How to Mark an Email as Not Spam in Outlook

Step 1

Click the Spam folder from the left-hand menu.

Step 2

Click on the checkbox next to the mail that was incorrectly sent to this folder. Then choose one of two methods for moving the email.

Option 1: Click Not Junk and the email will automatically be sent to your inbox.
Option 2: Click Move To and then click the folder on the drop-down list where you’d like the email to be sent — the inbox or another folder.

How to Spot Unwanted Emails: 8 Different Types

Now you know what spam emails are and how to limit them.

But how do you spot them?

There are multiple types of emails that can be used to invade your inbox:

1. Ads

Unwanted mail advertisements are the most popular type of unsolicited email.

They flood your inbox with product or service advertisements you never really wanted. Sometimes, an email might even include an affiliate link to a partner website.

For example, every time you register a new domain, you’ll probably receive several fraudulent emails from companies offering to help you build your website at affordable prices.

2. Email Spoofing

A spammer might impersonate someone you know or a company you’re involved with when sending a suspicious email.

For example, let’s say you’re in business with company XYZ, and they have an email address – [email protected]. A spammer might use something like [email protected] to send you an email message, impersonating their customer service executive.

Alternatively, they could try impersonating someone at your company:

If you’re not vigilant, you might open the spam email and end up informing them that your email account is active, or even sharing private, personal information.

This can result in your email inbox receiving a constant stream of illegitimate email or even a phishing attack (where a hacker pretends to be a trusted sender and tries to steal sensitive user data like login credentials or credit card numbers).

3. Hoaxes

Hoax emails are another common form of spam.

Chances are that you, like all of us, have received email messages containing unbelievable deals or some form of scandalous information, like a conspiracy theory.

For example, you might find emails talking about amazing weight loss journeys that “blew doctors’ minds” in your inbox. And apparently, all you need to do is buy a bunch of pills, and you’ll end up losing 30 pounds magically.

Always be on your guard against such fraudulent claims of miracle cures — and especially of exclusive discounts that seem too good to be true. They are only trying to steal sensitive information, like your bank account details.

4. Money Scam

These emails come from misleading domain names (like in email spoofing) and usually offer a massive reward. All you have to do is give them your bank account details to make the supposed “transfer.”

For example, you might receive an email or text message from a phony email address claiming you’ve won $500,000, and you can claim it as soon as you provide your credit card or social security number to initiate the payment. (Never do this.)

Or maybe they ask you to make a relatively nominal deposit at some bank account to confirm that you’re serious about getting the money.

Don’t fall for such scams that make fake offers of vast rewards from strangers in exchange for confidential information. It’s surely a phishing scam.

5. Malware Warnings

Sometimes, you could receive emails from businesses you don’t know, claiming that they’ve found malware on your computer.

They’ll even say their systems performed a “thorough analysis,” and they have the solution to help you eliminate the malware. And all you have to do is click on the link included in the message, and they’ll take care of the rest.

It’s probably a trick to redirect you to an affiliate website, or even worse, to install actual harmful malware onto your computer.

6. Adult Content

Another popular type of unsolicited email is adult emails spreading pornographic content.

An email service provider or inbox provider is usually capable of intercepting emails with adult content and sending them to your junk folder.

However, on the off-chance they do make it to your inbox, be warned that these emails advertise explicit content — offering “exclusive” links to pornographic material.

Be very wary of opening these as it’s probably another phishing attempt, and certainly not a safe place for personal information.

7. Educational Offerings

Educational offerings are a common type of unpermissioned promotional emails.

You might receive an unwanted email containing links to seminars, a virtual event, and so on.

Or they could be used for promoting “top-ranking” degrees in different countries.

Always remember that you never asked for these emails — even if they seem helpful. It’s best if you don’t open or interact with them as they could contain malware or phishing attacks.

8. Anti-spam Solutions

Ironic as it sounds, people actually send you junk emails offering anti-spam solutions.

They make their point by telling you: if they made it to your inbox, other malicious senders can, too.

The email tries to convince you why you must implement their “solution,” and why their service is “the best.”

As interesting as their approach might be, don’t give in to such gimmicks as you never know what will happen when you hand over your information to access their offers.

Wrapping Up

Spam emails are unwanted messages that are sent without your explicit permission.

They invade your inboxes, exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and are difficult to eliminate completely.

Luckily, it’s not impossible to limit the junk mail you receive.

To prevent it, keep your email address private and use an alternate email ID while browsing the web. You can also defend against unsolicited mail by not responding to any unwanted message, training your anti-spam filter, and using protective software for your computer.

Additionally, never click a link or download an email attachment from an email you suspect to be junk, and always be wary of any unknown sender.

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Today, after having been in this business for more than five years, I realized that a small percentage of people who installed our GMass Chrome extension never got it to work. Why? Because our buttons never showed up for them. Why? Because the extension’s “content script” never ran. In this article, I’ll dig into the mistake I was making and how I fixed it. If you’re developing a Chrome extension for Gmail, this is a critical concept to understand.

The three timing options for content scripts

When you designate your content script in your manifest.json file, there are three timing options for when your content script should run. They are:

document_idle
document_start
document_end

Google explains them in detail. They recommend that most extensions use document_idle, which fires in between the time the DOM is loaded and right after the window is loaded. However, if you’re developing an extension specifically for Gmail where you’re manipulating the Gmail DOM (Document Object Model), this will get you into trouble. In fact, all three of these can cause your script never to run. A complicating factor comes into play if you’re using the awesome Inbox SDK library with your extension.

Inbox SDK recommends that you remotely load your content script via its “loader” function. This is a beautiful concept because it allows you to make major changes to your extension without having to update your package with the Chrome Web Store and then wait for approval, and then wait again for all of your users’ browsers to get the update. The downside of this approach, however, is that your script could run later than you expect. The big flaw I discovered today was that in my content script, I had all my code wrapped in a window.onload event, like so:

window.onload = function(){
GMassReady();
}

function GMassReady(){...

}

In my manifest.json, I had my content script set to run at document_end:

"content_scripts": [ {
"js": [ "inboxsdk.js", "gmass.js"],
"matches": [ "http://mail.google.com/*", "https://mail.google.com/*" ],
"run_at": "document_end"
} ],

This worked for most users, but didn’t work for some. If your browser loaded Gmail particularly fast but loaded my remote content script particularly slowly, then the main code in the content script would never run. Why? Because window.onload would never fire, as it had already fired long before the remotely loaded content script was, well…remotely loaded. So window.onload fired before the script even existed in the browser’s scope.

Now, one solution to this problem is simply to package the script as part of the extension and stop loading it remotely. Then, using the window.onload wrapper would work, because it would guarantee that the script would be available by the time window.onload ran. However, I didn’t want to do that for the reason stated above.

How Gmail loads differently

The confusion for me in reading Google’s documentation on the run_at setting is that the rules for Gmail are different. The documentation says that if you’re using document_idle, you don’t need to wait for window.onload in your content script. This is wrong. Based on this, you might think you can use document_end and then call your content script, but this won’t work well either. That’s because the way the Gmail interface loads, the document_end event doesn’t actually fire when the DOM is ready, as the documentation states. Let’s prove this.

Here’s what happens when the script is run locally using document_end, so waiting until after the DOM is supposedly ready.

"run_at": "document_end"

DOM is not ready — Just from the look of Gmail, it’s obvious that the DOM isn’t ready when the script fires after document_end.

query for DOM proof — To prove that the Gmail DOM isn’t ready, we’ll query for an element that I know the Gmail DOM has, the “search” box. It’s not found.

caption: To compare, this is what the Gmail UI looks like when window.onload fires. Clearly the Gmail UI is ready.

Gmail search box element — And as expected, after window.onload has fired, the “search” box’s element can easily be found.

Chrome extension world vs. real life

The “document_end” option corresponds to the real-life JavaScript “DOMContentLoaded” event. Let’s look at the exact definitions of each.

document_end: “after the DOM is complete, but before subresources like images and frames have loaded.”

DOMContentLoaded: “The DOMContentLoaded event fires when the initial HTML document has been completely loaded and parsed, without waiting for stylesheets, images, and subframes to finish loading.”

See the similarities? So theoretically, if you are using a local content script, and you used document_start in manifest.json and wrapped your content script code inside a DOMContentLoaded event, that is the same thing as using document_end in your manifest.json and not wrapping your script inside a DOMContentLoaded event. If you’re using a remote content script, these rules go out the window because you simply don’t know how long it will take to load your script from its server. It’s possible that your script loads after the DOMContentLoaded event has already fired, and so wrapping your code in that event would cause it never to run.

So what’s the best approach?

The optimal setting, then, regardless of whether your content script is local or remote, is to set the script to document_start in manifest.json and then in your actual content script, wrap your code in an if/then condition based on whether or not window.onload has fired yet. By using document_start, it gets your script into the browser’s context as quickly as possible, and by using the if/then window.onload logic, it allows your script to run after it’s loaded if Gmail is ready or wait until the Gmail interface is ready. You could use document_idle or document_end, but that will just delay the inevitable…your script running. As long as you’re wrapped in a window.onload if/then checking system, you’re good.

Here’s the code:

if (document.readyState === "complete")
{
GMassReady();
}
else
{
window['onload'] = function () {
GMassReady();
}
}

function GMassReady(){...

Note: You might notice that my extension still uses document_end. Why? Because I haven’t updated my Chrome extension package yet in the Chrome Web Store. A few years ago, it was a simple process. You just uploaded a new package, and the Chrome Web Store updated — then worldwide, everyone’s browsers updated over the next couple of days. Now there’s a strict human review process before changes go live. Since I was able to fix my issue by altering my content script to include the new window.onload logic, that suffices for now.

What do other Gmail Chrome extensions do?

It turns out none of the other major Gmail extensions I tested use the default document_idle setting. As with many things in life, it seems I was the last to know about this. Let’s look at the manifest.json files of a couple of other extensions.

Mailtrack

Here’s the relevant portion of manifest.json:

content_scripts": [
        {
            "matches": [
                "https://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/lib/intercom-snippet.js",
                "scripts/lib/snowplowSnippet.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "https://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/gmail.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "https://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/bundles/gmail.start.bundle.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "https://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "css": [
                "styles/style.css"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_end"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "https://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/bundles/gmail.end.bundle.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_end"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mailtrack.io/*/dashboard/welcome*",
                "*://mailtrack.io/*/dashboard/reauthorized*",
                "*://mailtrack.io/*/dashboard/install-success*",
                "*://mailtrack.io/*/dashboard/payment/teams/success*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/bundles/setup.bundle.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mailtrack.io/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "scripts/bundles/dashboard.bundle.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_end"
        }
    ],

I haven’t dug into each content script here, but we can see that none of them use Google’s recommendation of document_idle.

Mixmax

Here’s a pertinent snippet of manifest.json:

"content_scripts": [
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://*.mixmax.com/*"
            ],
            "exclude_matches": [
                "*://*.mixmax.com/public/analyticsbridge.html"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/content/globals.js",
                "src/assets/lib/raven-3.3.0.js",
                "src/assets/lib/Environment.js",
                "src/assets/lib/raven-config.js",
                "src/assets/lib/error.js",
                "src/content/ExtensionMessageBus.js"
            ],
            "all_frames": true,
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/content/unblock.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mail.google.com/*",
                "*://*.force.com/*",
                "*://*.salesforce.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/content/globals.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/content/pageInterop.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_end"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://mail.google.com/*",
                "*://*.force.com/*",
                "*://*.salesforce.com/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/assets/lib/raven-3.3.0.js",
                "src/assets/lib/Environment.js",
                "src/assets/lib/raven-config.js",
                "src/assets/lib/error.js",
                "src/content/ExtensionMessageBus.js",
                "src/content/app.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_end"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://www.linkedin.com/sales/widget/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/content/globals.js"
            ],
            "all_frames": true,
            "run_at": "document_start"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "*://www.linkedin.com/sales/widget/*"
            ],
            "js": [
                "src/assets/lib/raven-3.3.0.js",
                "src/assets/lib/Environment.js",
                "src/assets/lib/raven-config.js",
                "src/assets/lib/error.js",
                "src/content/app.js"
            ],
            "all_frames": true,
            "run_at": "document_end"
        },
        {
            "matches": [
                "&lt;all_urls&gt;"
            ],
            "exclude_matches": [
                "*://mail.google.com/*"
            ],
            "all_frames": true,
            "js": [
                "src/content/mailTo.js",
                "src/content/callTo.js"
            ],
            "run_at": "document_idle"
        }
    ],

Again I haven’t dug into each one, but none of them use document_idle except the last one, which is the one script that does not run inside Gmail.

In Conclusion…

Developing an extension for Gmail is different than for other sites. We love Inbox SDK, and we love the ability to load content scripts remotely, but it’s important to get the timing right. Set your manifest.json to use document_start and wrap your content script code in an if/then that checks for the window.load event.

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Looking for the best Mailchimp alternatives?

While Mailchimp is an excellent email marketing tool, it comes with several limitations. For example, the interface is difficult to navigate and it has fairly expensive pricing plans.

Even if you’re on the free plan, you’ll only get limited customer support — which makes it challenging to use Mailchimp’s advanced features.

So it’s understandable if you’re looking for a change.

In this article, I’ll highlight 10 powerful Mailchimp alternatives. I’ll go over their key features, pricing, and user ratings to help you zone in on the right tool.

This Article Contains:

Why Are Most Mailchimp Users Looking For a Change?
10 Powerful Mailchimp Alternatives

Let’s jump right in.

Why Are Most Mailchimp Users Looking for a Change?

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform with several powerful features like advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and more.

However, it’s not perfect.

For starters, the email marketing features I mentioned above are only available in its Premium plan (starting at $306.15/month).

And while its Essentials plan (starts at $10.25/month) and Standard plan (starts at $15.31/month) seem affordable, you can only send up to 500 emails at that price. Once your contact count increases beyond 500, the prices can go above $100/month!

Additionally, Mailchimp’s user interface can be complicated to use for novice users.

Another significant limitation is that nearly every HTML template that it comes with requires heavy editing.

And although Mailchimp offers landing page builder and social media marketing features like Instagram and Facebook ad management, it doesn’t support affiliate marketing.

Read my in-depth Mailchimp review for more information.

10 Powerful Mailchimp Alternatives

Here are 10 great Mailchimp alternatives that can boost your email marketing activities immediately:

1. GMass

If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and effective email marketing and outreach tool, look no further than GMass.

An excellent Mailchimp alternative, GMass is a comprehensive email marketing platform used by tech giants like Google and Uber and social media titans like Twitter and LinkedIn.

It works flawlessly within Gmail’s interface and is also an ideal tool for solopreneurs, startups, SMBs, and even churches.

The best part?

To get started, all you have to do is download the GMass Chrome Extension and sign up with your Gmail account. It’s that simple!

If you’re an Android user, you can even use GMass’s Gmail add-on to manage your campaigns on the go.

GMass Key Features

Here are the five powerful features of GMass.

A. Automatically Create Email Lists

Without an email list you can’t run an effective email marketing campaign, right?

GMass helps you automatically create massive email lists right inside Gmail.

Using its Build Email List feature, you can get your desired email list based on:

Gmail search results.
Gmail labels, and
Transactional email notifications in your inbox.

Read this article to know more about the Build Email List feature.

B. Automatic Personalization

The GMass email marketing tool improves your email marketing efforts by personalizing your automated emails.

You get advanced personalization settings like:

Automatic recipient name identification from email addresses.
Automatic customization of large texts in email bodies.
Sending personalized mail merges from Google Sheets.
Automatically adding personalized attachments, images, and links.

C. Powerful Reports and Analytics

GMass generates Campaign reports to help you analyze and boost your email performance.

Once you send out an email campaign, GMass automatically starts collecting data on:

Unique email opens and clicks.
Replies and bounces.
Unsubscribe and block rates, etc.

Additionally, for maximum ease of use, you can access the reports right inside your Gmail inbox!

D. Automated Follow-ups

With GMass, you don’t have to manually compose every follow-up mail separately.

Its follow-up automation feature helps you customize and automate your follow-up emails in one go by:

Personalizing the follow-up email content.
Customizing what triggers follow-ups.
Setting up the number of follow-ups each recipient receives and their frequency.

E. Bulk Email Sends

Want to send bulk emails to your massive customer base?

GMass helps you do exactly that with its SMTP integration.

By connecting with any SMTP service provider, GMass not only enables you to send mass emails in a snap but also ensures better inbox placement and email delivery.

This helps you send unlimited email marketing campaigns, transactional emails, and cold emails to your recipients

F. Email Scheduling

GMass’s simple email scheduling feature lets you plan your emails well in advance.

All you have to do is draft your emails, schedule it, and sit back — GMass will do the rest. And if you want to change the schedule, just reschedule from your Gmail Drafts folder.

GMass Pricing

GMass’ email marketing solution offers multiple flexible pricing plans for both individuals and teams:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

GMass Ratings

Capterra: 4.9/5 (500+ reviews)
G2: 4.8/5 (500+ reviews)

Ideal For

Large organizations, schools, churches, entrepreneurs, SMBs, email marketers — pretty much anyone who uses Gmail.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a Mailchimp alternative that doubles up as an email marketing tool and sales automation platform. However, this email marketing service doesn’t have a free plan.

Check out my comprehensive ActiveCampaign review.

ActiveCampaign Key Features

The email marketing software helps you create targeted emails, scheduled emails, etc.
Create landing pages with its landing page builder and use forms, chatbots and other automation features to grab more leads.
Create custom email content for better email engagement through Dynamic Content features.
Supports email list segmentation via tags and custom fields.
Automation Map helps you manage and analyze existing email automation and plan new ones based on advanced reports.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing plans start at $15/month. This includes 500 contacts, unlimited email sending, marketing automation, and more.

ActiveCampaign Ratings

Capterra: 4.6/5 (850+ reviews)
G2: 4.6/5 (5000+ reviews)

Ideal For

SMBs, email marketers.

3. HubSpot Marketing Hub

A great Mailchimp alternative, HubSpot Marketing Hub, is an all-in-one marketing and sales software suite. However, HubSpot doesn’t support cold email marketing as it violates their user policies.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Key Features

Offers email templates to create email campaigns with ease,
Helps customize email body, subject lines, attachments, and calls-to-action based on your sales cycle, list memberships, etc.
Offers A/B tests and detailed engagement analytics to measure email performance and subscriber behavior.
Helps apply if-then logic in email automation to create email sequences based on individual customer actions.
Offers access to an analytics dashboard and landing page builders for added functionality.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a free plan with limited features. Its paid plan starts at $50/month and includes list segmentation, live chat, and other features.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Ratings

Capterra: 4.5/5 (4000+ reviews)
G2: 4.3/5 (6000+ reviews)

Ideal For

Digital marketing agencies, startups, large organizations, ecommerce platforms, nonprofits, tech companies.

Ajay’s Email Tip

Improve audience engagement by starting and ending your emails properly. Read my step-by-step guide on how to start and end emails to maximize email engagement.

4. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an email marketing and marketing automation service provider.

By using its own SMTP servers, this Mailchimp alternative can bypass the email sending limits of an email service provider like Gmail and Yahoo.

Read my in-depth Sendinblue review.

Sendinblue Key Features

Can use its email template library to create campaigns from scratch.
Helps optimize send times via the “Send at the Best Time” feature based on customer behavior.
The Drag & Drop Editor’s intuitive interface helps personalize emails as per every customer’s needs.
Supports unlimited contacts listing and segmenting without additional charges.
Helps create email autoresponders and mailing lists with basic and advanced marketing automation workflows.

Sendinblue Pricing

Sendinblue’s free plan offers up to 300 daily email sends with unlimited contacts. Starting at $25/month, its paid plan includes unlimited email sends, A/B testing, and more.

Sendinblue Ratings

Capterra: 4.4/5 (500+ reviews)
G2: 4.6/5 (1100+ reviews)

Ideal For

Small businesses, startups.

5. Moosend

Moosend’s email marketing platform is a powerful Mailchimp competitor that helps you create, send, and analyze email campaigns.

However, note that the sign-up forms offered by this email marketing service are basic and need additional customizations.

Check out my detailed Moosend review.

Moosend Key Features

The Campaign Editor helps you create regular, automation, and A/B testing campaigns.
The email automation feature helps automate email notifications like abandoned cart notifications, product promotions, etc.
Supports list segmentation based on customer behavior, product preference, type of browsers and devices used, etc.
The email marketing provider also offers live chat support for maximum customer experience.
Provides real-time reports and analytics to track customer activity, like the device or email client most customers use.

Moosend Pricing

Moosend’s free forever plan supports unlimited email sends and sign up and subscription forms. Its paid plan starts at $8/month.

Moosend Ratings

Capterra: 4.8/5 (100+ reviews)
G2: 4.7/5 (200+ reviews)

Ideal For

Startups, large organizations, agencies, SaaS companies, nonprofits.

6. Amazon SES

A cloud-based email outreach service, Amazon SES, helps you send both marketing and transactional emails.

However, this Mailchimp competitor can get expensive and can be extremely complicated for users without a tech background.

Read my detailed Amazon SES review.

Amazon SES Key Features

Helps send emails through both email API and SMTP.
Offers sender reputation monitoring via its Deliverability Dashboard.
Supports DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentications for a secure email sending and verification process.
Connects seamlessly with other AWS services like Amazon EC2, AWS Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, etc.
Its BYOIP (Bring Your Own IP) feature allows you to use your own IP address for a better sender reputation.

Amazon SES Pricing

Amazon SES is a pay-as-you-go service.

It allows you to send 62,000 free emails under its Free Tier Usage when SES is integrated with applications running on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

After this limit is exhausted, SES charges $0.10 for every 1,000 emails.

However, even if you use the Free Tier, you’d have to pay additional costs like:

$0.12 for every GB of outgoing mail data.
$0.09 for each 1,000 incoming email chunk of and above 256KB.
Data transfer fees for other AWS services.

Amazon SES Ratings

Capterra: 4.7/5 (60+ reviews)
G2: 4.2/5 (100+ reviews)

Ideal For

Large organizations, developers.

7. AWeber

AWeber is an easily navigable email marketing platform best suited for small businesses. However, it lags behind other email marketing software providers in offering advanced templates.

AWeber Key Features

The marketing platform helps create branded emails automatically with its Smart Designer feature.
Supports email automation through automated workflow features and triggers.
Offers pre-built reports containing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure email campaign performance.
Offers quick subscriber management via list segmentation and targeting.
Can create an email newsletter by using website blog content and then reformatting it via its Blog Broadcast feature.

AWeber Pricing

AWeber’s free plan supports up to 500 subscribers and 3000 monthly email sends. Its paid plan starts at $19/month and offers unlimited email sends, subscribers, etc.

Aweber Ratings

Capterra: 4.3/5 (100+ reviews)
G2: 4.2/5 (500+ reviews)

Ideal For

Small businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, online content creators, and nonprofits.

8. GetResponse

GetResponse is user-friendly email automation and marketing platform packed with several features like customizable templates and advanced segmentation.

However, this Mailchimp alternative doesn’t offer two-factor authentication for added security.

GetResponse Key Features

Can share blog posts through emails and on social media via automated blog digest.
Can automate email campaigns using pre-built workflows or automated workflows created from scratch.
Access ready-made and mobile responsive landing page templates via its Landing Page Creator.
Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery tools to help deliver emails at the right time.
Allows you to install website tracking codes to track website visits and sign ups that come via email links.

GetResponse Pricing

GetResponse’s paid plan starts at $15/month for a contact base of 1000 contacts.

GetResponse Ratings

Capterra: 4.1/5 (200+ reviews)
G2: 4.1/5 (600+ reviews)

Ideal For

Both SMBs and large organizations.

9. Mailjet

Mailjet enables email marketers to create and send bulk emails through both a free SMTP server and an email API. However, their email marketing automation features can be quite limited.

Check out my detailed Mailjet Review.

Mailjet Key Features

Compiles email performance data including deliverability, unsubscribe, and bounce rates.
Provides a free SMTP server for unlimited email sends.
Includes multi-user access for team collaboration.
Helps obtain customer feedback from web pages through its easily customizable subscriber widget.
The GDPR compliant double opt-in feature helps add website visitors to mailing lists with their consent.

Mailjet Pricing

Mailjet’s free pricing plan offers 6000 free emails/month along with 200 daily email sends.

Starting at $9.65/month, its paid plan offers 30,000 monthly emails with unlimited daily email sends and online customer support.

Mailjet Ratings

Capterra: 4.3/5 (300+ reviews)
G2: 4.0/5 (80+ reviews)

Ideal For

Large and small organizations, online stores.

10. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns has email marketing features to help improve your marketing game.

The issue is that this email marketing software can take a significant amount of time to get used to.

Zoho Campaigns Key Features

Supports easy subscriber list import from Zoho CRM and Google Workspace.
Supports lead-nurturing, customer engagement, and promotional email automation.
Creates in-depth email campaign reports highlighting clicks, opens, shares, unsubscribe counts, recipients’ locations, devices, etc.
Automatically transfers spam addresses to a do-not-mail list.
Has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Zoho Campaigns Pricing

Zoho Campaigns’ prices start at $5/month.

Zoho Campaigns Ratings

Capterra: 4.1/5 (170+ reviews)
G2: 4.4/5 (750+ reviews)

Ideal For

Both SMBs and large organizations.

Final Thoughts

Mailchimp may claim to be the “best” all-in-one marketing platform.

But that doesn’t make it perfect.

Apart from being an expensive marketing tool, Mailchimp’s user interface can be complicated and its email templates require a lot of customizations.

So why settle for an email marketing tool like Mailchimp when the alternatives I mentioned here offer so much more for far less?

And while all these tools have some unique features, GMass is a tool that can suit any email marketer. It’s easy to set up and use, and can easily automate your email marketing campaigns to boost overall email productivity.

So why not give GMass a try today to enhance your email marketing experience?

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail

Send incredible emails & automations and avoid the spam folder — all in one powerful but easy-to-learn tool

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Read any good Mailchimp reviews lately?

Mailchimp is a powerful email marketing tool that lets you send large email marketing campaigns, use marketing automation to send targeted emails to multiple lists, and even build landing pages.

However, it might not be the perfect fit for everyone.

In this Mailchimp review, I’ll cover everything you need to know about it, including its key features, pricing, and limitations. I’ll also highlight a Mailchimp alternative that’s perfect for all email outreach needs.

This Mailchimp Review Covers:

What is Mailchimp?
5 Mailchimp Features That Power-Up Your Email Marketing
Mailchimp Pricing
4 Mailchimp Limitations to Consider
How to Deal with These Drawbacks Using a Mailchimp Alternative

Let’s dive into it.

What Is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a cloud-based email marketing platform. It helps you create, send, automate, and manage marketing and transactional emails.

It’s promoted as an all-in-one solution to marketing — offering digital marketing and social media marketing features, like managing your Facebook ads, landing page, and website sign-up form.

Sounds good, but how does this email marketing platform actually work?

You can integrate Mailchimp with opt-in forms and landing pages to capture the email addresses of your website visitors and leads.

Additionally, Mailchimp lets you import email lists from an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet into its platform. Then, just go to the Campaigns tab and use the Campaign Builder to create emails.

Here you can:

Choose the campaign type — Choose among Regular, Automated, Plain Text, and A/B Test options.
Select specific recipients from the list or the entire list depending on your email marketing needs.
Create segments of the selected recipients/lists based on campaign responses.
Enter your campaign name and subject line, and enable/disable tracking options.
Use Mailchimp’s easy drag-and-drop editor to create your email. You can also use an email template to speed up the process.
You can then send out the campaign immediately or schedule it for distribution later.

5 Mailchimp Features That Power-Up Your Email Marketing

Let’s go over five key Mailchimp features in this Mailchimp review:

A. Email Marketing Campaigns

Mailchimp helps you create four types of email campaigns.

Let’s take a quick look at each campaign type:

1. Regular

The Regular campaign helps you customize and design emails to maximize marketing campaign performance and audience engagement.

In a Regular campaign, you can choose from pre-built, basic templates or use custom code to create your own emails from scratch.

While Mailchimp’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder helps you create beautiful emails, its Content Studio ensures that all the design elements and email templates are stored safely for future needs.

Additionally, Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant tool helps you create designs for your emails instantly using your landing page theme or website colors, fonts, images, and logos.

2. Plain Text

Want to send simple text emails to your customers without any images or enhanced designs? Use Mailchimp’s Plain Text campaign.

However, note that you can only compose your plain text email with Mailchimp’s Campaign Builder. Copy-pasting email content from Microsoft Word or other text editors can cause formatting errors.

3. Email Testing Campaigns

Mailchimp supports A/B testing and Multivariate testing to help you determine how to tailor your campaigns for better engagement.

a. A/B Testing

The A/B testing or split testing feature in Mailchimp tests the performance of up to three different versions (test combinations) of the same email based on a variable.

The four variables you can choose from are:

Subject line
Sender name
Content
Send time

Choose the variable you want to test, compose the email, and send the test combinations to different customer groups from your list.

Mailchimp automatically measures the performance of these test combinations based on click rate and open rate, etc., and identifies the winning combination. You can also manually choose the winning combination by going through Mailchimp’s test reports.

b. Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing allows you to test three out of the four variables and creates up to eight test combinations at the same time. The process for identifying the winning combination is the same as in A/B testing.

Note: While A/B testing is available in the base pricing plan, multivariate is exclusively for Premium users.

4. Automated

Mailchimp’s Automation Builder helps you create automated emails based on user triggers. These emails are also called autoresponders.

Whether it’s email campaign follow-ups or welcome emails, you can use Mailchimp’s automation to create and automate email sends based on a specific date, event, or contact activity, such as opens, clicks, or unresponsiveness, etc.

B. Mailchimp Marketing API

Mailchimp’s Marketing API allows developers to personalize Mailchimp’s functions to sync emails, manage campaigns, and more.

You can even use the API to connect directly to your app to send automated transactional and marketing emails.

Additionally, with the Mailchimp API, you can:

Manage contacts with tags and segmentation.
Use webhooks to check opens and clicks.
View subscriber behavior and compare trends or patterns.

However, if you’re looking to automate the whole customer journey (from visit to purchase), try out Mailchimp’s Transactional Email add-on, Mandrill.

Check out my detailed Mandrill Review to learn more.

C. Advanced List Segmentation

Mailchimp’s advanced list segmentation feature helps you organize your contacts into various segments for better targeting.

It lets you create customizable segments (subscriber lists) containing multiple conditions, such as:

Automation activity (lists that are created based on the automation activity triggered by the recipient)

Campaign activity (mailing lists based on emails sent, opens, and clicks)
Email client (lists based on your subscribers’ devices and mailbox apps)

D. Detailed Reporting and Analytics

Mailchimp offers three types of email reports to help you analyze campaign performance. Here’s a quick look into each report type:

1. Email Campaign Reports

Mailchimp’s email campaign reports give you an overview of your email’s engagement.

You’ll not only get an idea of the number of recipients and email delivery time but also:

Opens, clicks, and bounce rates of targeted emails.
Competitors’ campaign comparison for campaign benchmarking.
A count of subscribes and unsubscribes, etc.

If you have an online store, you can also view stats on different product purchases from your email campaigns in the ecommerce tab.

Ajay’s Email Tip

Correctly starting and ending an email is necessary to increase email engagement. Check out my step-by-step guide on how to start and end emails the right way.

2. Comparative Reports

Mailchimp’s comparative report helps you compare different email campaigns that you’ve sent over the last 18 months.

Available exclusively under Mailchimp’s Premium plan, these reports can only be accessed by managers, business owners, and admins.

E. Multiple Integrations

From marketing automation and event management to payment processing apps, Mailchimp offers 200+ integrations to boost your email marketing capabilities.

Some of the best Mailchimp integrations include:

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, etc.
PayPal
Calendly
Asana

What’s more…

You can also connect Mailchimp to your WordPress website through its WordPress plugin.

Mailchimp Pricing

Mailchimp offers four pricing plans to suit various user needs.

However, each plan comes with limited storage and email sends per month — starting at up to 500 contacts. When you exceed these limits, you’ll have to pay additional charges, which can go up to $400/month.

The tool also has a Pay As You Go pricing structure — for which Mailchimp users would have to buy email credits (each email send costs one credit). You’ll have to contact Mailchimp for the price of each credit.

Here are the details of their pricing plans.

I’ve mentioned the contact storage and email send limits for each plan for clarity. Note that “audience” is loosely equivalent to “list.”

A. Free Plan

Supports:

Up to 2,000 contacts and 1 audience (subscriber)
A free Mailchimp domain
10,000 monthly email sends
Basic list segmentation and reports
Integration with 200+ apps

B. Essentials (starts at $10.25/month)

Supports:

Up to 50,000 contacts and 3 audiences
500,000 monthly email sends
Classic automation builder
A/B testing features

C. Standard (starts at $15.31/month)

Supports:

Up to 100,000 contacts and 5 audiences
1.2 million monthly email sends
Email address finder
Basic, pre-built, and custom templates
Single-step and classic automation

D. Premium (starts at $306.15/month)

Supports:

200,000+ contacts and unlimited audiences
Over 3 million monthly email sends
Advanced list segmentation
Behavior-based automation

Comparative reporting
24/7 phone and chat support

4 Mailchimp Limitations to Consider

Despite the various features Mailchimp offers, here are four significant limitations to using it:

A. Complicated Interface

Many user reviews highlight that Mailchimp needs a significant getting-used-to-it period to navigate its UI with confidence.

Additionally, customizing Mailchimp’s settings can be very difficult.

If you want to personalize Mailchimp’s settings to suit your needs, you’ll have to go through several tabs and windows to find what you need — which makes it highly inconvenient.

B. Expensive Pricing

Out of Mailchimp’s four pricing plans, the Free, Standard, and Essentials plans may seem inexpensive.

But there’s a catch.

The free plan doesn’t have the features to support extensive email marketing campaigns — it’s more like a trial run than a proper plan.

Moreover, with its Essentials Plan (starting at $10.25/month) and Standard Plan (starting at $15.31/month), you can send emails to only 500 contacts. The moment you increase your number of contacts, the prices go above $100/month.

And as for the Premium plan, it starts at $306.15/month!

The bottom line is that to access almost all of Mailchimp’s features and send emails to your massive customer base, you’ll not only have to choose a paid plan but also rack up charges of more than $100/month.

C. Inadequate Support for Free Plans

If you’re using Mailchimp’s free account, you’re probably all on your own.

For free users, the tool offers customer support only for the first 30 days, and only via email. After that, you’ll either have to figure it out on your own or search for a solution in their knowledge base.

This raises two issues:

First, you’ll have to wait for their response while you have a campaign to run. There’s no specific response time.
Second, after the first 30 days, if you hit a roadblock using the platform, Mailchimp can’t help you.

Surprisingly, for paid plan users, they offer not only 24/7 online support (chat and email) but also phone support. So for excellent customer service, you’d have to go for their expensive paid plans.

D. Doesn’t Support Affiliate Marketing

While Mailchimp claims to be an “all-in-one marketing tool,” it doesn’t support affiliate marketing. This can be inconvenient for product promotion campaigns, especially for retailers.

How to Deal with These Drawbacks Using a Mailchimp Alternative

If there’s one thing that’s clear so far, it’s that Mailchimp isn’t perfect.

Besides not supporting affiliate marketing, Mailchimp is fairly expensive and also offers inadequate customer support in its affordable plans!

What you need is an alternative that can help you avoid these drawbacks.

And if you’re looking for the best Mailchimp alternative, try GMass.

What’s GMass?

GMass is an email outreach and marketing automation tool that works right inside Gmail.

While it’s popular among tech giants like Google and Uber, and social media titans like Twitter and LinkedIn, GMass is also perfect for SMBs, startups, solopreneurs, and churches to send unlimited emails.

Why GMass Is an Excellent Mailchimp Alternative

Here are four reasons that GMass is the perfect Mailchimp alternative:

A. Works within the Gmail Interface

To use GMass for email marketing, you don’t need another dashboard or a separate platform. That’s because it works completely within Gmail’s interface.

From creating email campaigns to sending an email blast and getting reports, you can do it all inside your Gmail inbox.

Along with the powerful Chrome extension, GMass also has an official Gmail add-on for Android devices.

Just connect the GMass add-on or the extension to your Gmail account, and you’re good to go. This gives you the best email experience on both desktop and mobile platforms.

B. A Go-To Platform for Email Outreach

Want to send cold emails and run drip campaigns?

With its powerful features for email outreach, GMass helps you send bulk cold emails in a snap. GMass can also directly connect with Google Sheets to perform large mail merges instantly from spreadsheets.

To get started, upload your contact list on Google Sheets and connect it to GMass.

You can also create your contact list using GMass’ Build Email List feature.

Once done, GMass helps you streamline your campaigns through advanced features like these:

Automatically identifying recipients’ first names and adding them to your emails
Automatically adding personalized attachments, images, and links to each email
Scheduling emails according to your recipient’s time zone
Sending automated follow-ups for maximum engagement
Helping to avoid spam folders via its advanced email distribution service
Allowing you to check your text, design, and personalization through test mode
Connecting with any SMTP service provider (like SendGrid) to send virtually unlimited emails to your list of subscribers with ease
Improve your inbox placement and deliverability with GMass’ Inbox, Spam, or Promotions tool.

C. Get Detailed Insights with the Campaign Report

GMass offers in-depth automated campaign reports within your Gmail inbox.

You’ll get insights into all the email metrics you need to analyze campaign performance like:

Total recipients
Unique clicks
Replies
Unsubscribes
Bounces
And far more!

D. Far More Affordable Than Mailchimp

GMass offers more affordable plans — considering there are NO restrictions on emails, contacts, or campaigns.

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Final Thoughts

Mailchimp is a great email marketing tool packed with tons of features.

Not only does it help create different email campaigns but also it includes hundreds of integrations, custom API, and advanced list segmentation.

However, it’s far from perfect.

For starters, its pricing plans are incredibly high, it has a complicated UI, and it doesn’t support affiliate marketing campaigns.

And if you think Mailchimp isn’t the right tool for you, you can always try GMass.

GMass is perfect for all sorts of email senders — from casual users to professional email marketers.

From campaign reports to automated follow-ups, it’s got everything you could ever need, so why not give GMass a try and scale your email marketing today?

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Ever found yourself asking this question:

“Why are my emails going to spam?”

You’re not alone.

Tons of emails go to the spam folder when they are caught by spam filters.

But why do they filter out your emails?

To help you get to the bottom of the problem, I’ve highlighted five major reasons why many legitimate emails (like yours) go to spam and how to avoid spam filters.

This Article Contains:

5 Reasons Your Emails Are Going to Spam
How to Avoid Spam Filters: 4 Clear-Cut Ways
The Easiest Solution to Your Spam Problems
FAQs about Spam Filters

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

Note: I’ll start by covering why your emails are currently going to spam and how to avoid that. If you want first to understand what spam filters are, skip ahead to that section.

5 Reasons Your Emails Are Going to Spam

Here are five key reasons why your emails end up in the spam folder:

1. Your Recipients Never Asked for Your Emails

Anyone who hasn’t permitted you to send emails to them probably isn’t interested in receiving your emails in their inbox.

Sure, you can purchase mail lists or find email addresses from LinkedIn and other social media websites. However, when your emails reach these contacts, most of them will either ignore or delete your mail.

And if you continue sending them emails they didn’t ask for, you’re increasing the chances of your email being marked as spam and lowering your sender reputation.

But that isn’t all.

Some of the email addresses in your mailing list (especially if it’s a purchased list) might be spam traps — which further increases your bounce rate and decreases your sender score.

What’s a spam trap?

A spam trap is an email address used by prominent ISPs for email fraud management. These look like regular email addresses but don’t belong to any user and are only used to identify and blacklist the addresses of spammers.

If you have high spam complaints, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and ESP (Email Service Provider) can blacklist your email and IP address and mark you as a spammer.

2. Your Sender Address Is Incorrect

The domain name and email ID associated with any marketing email must be authentic for the spam filter to identify the sender.

Hiding the source of an email address with the help of a proxy server is a common tactic used by habitual spammers. That’s why certain spam filters, like header filters, check email headers (an HTML code snippet) to verify you as an approved sender.

If header filters can’t verify your sender information, your inbox placement chances take a big hit.

3. You’re Using Spam Trigger Words

Your emails will head to your recipient’s spam folder if they contain a spam trigger word.

What’s a spam trigger word?

Common words and phrases recognized by ESPs in spam emails are called spam triggers.

“Free,” “You are a winner,” “No disappointment,” etc., are a few examples of spam triggers.

Using such spam words in your email body can result in your mail being automatically marked as spam or junk mail (emails with too many promotional materials, donation requests, or catalogs).

Ajay’s Email Tip

It’s essential to start and end your emails better to increase audience engagement. Read my detailed guide on how you can start and end your emails without using any spam trigger words to maximize email engagement.

4. Your Email Doesn’t Include an Unsubscribe Link

This is important if you send marketing and sales emails like newsletters or product promotions, etc.

If there’s no opt-out link in your email, you aren’t just making yourself vulnerable to spam complaints; you’re also ignoring the CAN-SPAM Act that governs email communications in the US.

Additionally, you’re giving subscribers the flexibility to unsubscribe whenever they want without lodging any spam complaints. This way, you can improve your sender and domain reputation.

5. You’re Using a Flagged IP Address

Sometimes your email has a clear header, no spam triggers, is CAN-SPAM compliant, and still ends up in the spam folder with other spam emails.

This can happen when you use a shared IP address or if your sending domain isn’t verified.

What does that mean?

Many email marketing platforms, like Mailjet and Sendinblue, offer shared IP addresses — that you and a hundred other business owners use to send emails.

If a user’s mailbox provider or email provider (like Gmail) flags a shared IP address due to spam complaints of another sender, the IP reputation of that address goes down.

This way, even if you send solicited emails through that address, it goes to recipients’ spam folder — due to no fault of your own.

You also have to check whether your sending domain follows authentications like:

SPF (Sender Policy Framework): allows you to specify the mail server authorized to send emails from your domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): uses encrypted email signatures to verify if emails aren’t fake.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): allows senders to validate if their emails are protected by SPF and DKIM authentications.

These authentications block spoofing (disguising an unknown source as a known source) and phishing attacks (fraudulent attempts to obtain sensitive data) — ensuring that your IP reputation is preserved.

How to Avoid Spam Filters: 4 Clear-Cut Ways

Here are four smart ways to avoid spam filters to ensure that your emails reach your recipient’s inboxes.

1. Create Quality Email Content

If you don’t want your legitimate message to be marked as a spam email, make sure the header has all the valid information, including the “From,” “To,” and domain name, etc.

Try to keep your email body simple and concise without using spammy words. Additionally, avoid using all caps for your email message and subject line.

Personalize emails by adding your recipient’s name, and ensure that your emails are multiple-email-client compatible by ensuring:

The links and images have absolute paths.
The email contains clear preview texts.

And don’t forget to run grammar checks before sending your emails!

2. Get Your Recipient’s Permission Using a Double Opt-In

Sure, using landing page and website forms are a great way to get your leads’ email IDs.

However, you need to ensure those mail address owners are actually willing to receive marketing emails from your business.

The double opt-in method ensures this.

This way, when a prospective subscriber submits their email address anywhere online (first opt-in), they get an instant confirmation link in their registered email address.

By clicking on the link (second opt-in), they confirm their intention to connect with you and permit you to add them to your email list so you can send them emails.

This way, you get a list of authentic email addresses that want your emails, and your spam count stays low.

3. Keep Your Email List Clean

If you want your emails to get past spam filters, it’s incredibly important to update your email list regularly.

Check for spam traps, disposable mail IDs, and shared email addresses in your mail list and remove them immediately. Sending emails to such mail addresses result in hard bounces — alerting spam filters and affecting your sender reputation.

Additionally, look for email addresses that are no longer active.

You can also check the opens and clicks metrics from your email campaign reports to evaluate who isn’t interested in your content and remove them from your list.

4. Ask Subscribers to Whitelist You

As an email recipient, when you whitelist an address, you’re marking it as a safe sender — notifying your spam filter that the sender is a safe email ID.

Requesting your subscribers to whitelist your email address is a great way to avoid spam filters as the filters recognize that your recipients have marked you as safe. This way, any future email you send goes directly to your subscriber’s inbox.

The Easiest Solution to Your Spam Problems

GMass is an email marketing and outreach platform that works within Gmail and is used by employees at tech giants like Google and Uber and social media titans like LinkedIn and Facebook.

However, this email marketing tool is also perfect for startups, SMBs, solopreneurs, and churches who send individual or bulk emails that can get past spam filters.

With GMass, you can:

Personalize emails and send mail merges with Google Sheets.
Automatically build email lists.
Schedule your emails.
Create automated follow-up emails.
Get detailed campaign reports and analytics.
Send bulk emails via SMTP to bypass Gmail’s sending limits.

Additionally, GMass is super easy to set up.

Just download the GMass Chrome extension, and you’re good to go!

Android users can also download the Gmail add-on to stay productive on the move.

3 Ways GMass Solves Your Spam Problems

Here’s how GMass can help you send emails that avoid getting flagged by spam filters:

1. GMass’ Spam Solver

With GMass’ in-built Spam Solver feature, you can protect your emails (including cold emails) from spam filtering.

This spam filtering solution is super easy to use and can save you a ton of time and effort.

Working within Gmail’s Compose window, GMass’ spam checker automates email testing to give you reports on Inbox vs. Promotions vs. Spam placements across 20 different Gmail and Workspace accounts.

What this does is show you where your email will potentially land — whether it will end up in a recipient’s inbox, their promotions tab, or their spam folder.

You can then use different conditions like “Eliminate images,” “Send plain text only,” and more to improve inbox placement.

2. You Can Use a Custom Tracking Domain

GMass helps you set up a custom tracking domain for your email campaigns — securing you from spam filters.

Whether you’re using a Google Workspace or a Gmail account, GMass lets you swap out the default domains and use a branded tracking domain name, like link.mycompany.com.

While it can be slightly technical to set up, using custom domains help improve your email deliverability and avoid spam filters — as you’re no longer using a shared domain.

Check out how you can set up your dedicated tracking domain with GMass.

3. Use Gmail’s IP Address

Unlike other email marketing services such as Mailchimp, GMass doesn’t use its own sending IP address.

GMass users send emails using Gmail’s IP address itself.

And, as Gmail’s sending IP address is the most reputable and widely used address worldwide, your emails have better deliverability.

Note: This doesn’t mean that your emails will always be delivered. If Gmail’s sophisticated spam filters identify that you’re sending email spam, your messages would be blocked by the Gmail spam filter.

You still have to follow all the best practices I listed earlier to avoid spam filters.

Read up on when your emails could get flagged as spam when using GMass.

FAQs about Spam Filters

I hope “why are my emails going to spam?” is no longer a question that worries you!

However, I’m sure you still have other questions about spam filters in general. Here’s a small section answering most of the common FAQs on spam filtering:

1. What Is a Spam Filter?

A spam filter (also called an anti-spam filter) is a program that detects and blocks spam emails or unsolicited emails from reaching your inbox. These include scam ads, phishing mail, hoax offers, and malware, etc.

However, sometimes spam filters might incorrectly label a legitimate email as spam.

Such emails are known as false positives.

Check out my article on spam emails to know more about limiting spam.

2. What Are the 3 Categories and Types of Spam Filters?

Spam filter or anti-spam filter categories are based on the spam detection systems’ locations in the email sending process.

Spam filter types are based on how filters work.

Here’s a quick look into both:

A. Spam Filter Categories

There are three common types of spam filter categories:

Gateway Spam Filter: an on-premise solution that exists behind a network’s firewall. It screens all incoming emails before they enter the company’s network.
Hosted Spam Filter: cloud-based software that can be used within an organization’s network.
Desktop Spam Filter: locally downloadable filters that can be customized according to users’ needs.

B. Spam Filter Types

The three main types of spam filters include:

Content Filter: checks the email header and body. It scans the recipient address, return address, looks for spam trigger words, and blocks unwanted emails.
Bayesian Filter: analyzes your spam preferences based on the emails you mark as spam and automatically filters incoming emails with similar spam qualities intuitively.
Rule-Based Filter: follows the spam settings you specifically define to screen an incoming message and block spam messages.

3. What Is the CAN-SPAM Act (2003)?

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) spells out commercial email sending standards in the US.

Enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the CAN-SPAM Act empowers email recipients to stop senders from emailing them.

Note that the CAN-SPAM Act applies to both bulk and individual email sent from any business.

Here’s a rundown of the act’s essential rules to help you send CAN-SPAM-compliant emails:

The “From,” “To,” “Reply-to,” domain name, other header information, and subject line should be accurate.
If an email message is an ad, senders should clearly identify it as an ad.
Email messages should include the sender’s valid physical postal address.
The body content of any commercial email should offer recipients the choice to opt-out from receiving further emails. It must also clarify how they can go about this.
Any opt-out request should be honored within ten business days.
Businesses can’t charge a fee or ask for any information when a recipient opts out except the email address of that recipient.
Once a recipient opts out, businesses can’t sell or transfer their email addresses in the form of mailing lists.
In case of any third-party email sending assistance, businesses should ensure that they, too, are complying with the law.
Any violation of these standards is subject to financial penalties.

Final Thoughts

Spam filters help you keep spam messages or phishing attacks at bay.

But sometimes, even your legitimate emails can get caught by spam filters!

While one of the easiest ways to avoid spam filters is to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, it’s safer to follow the other methods I covered in this article as well.

And if you want a super fast and easy way to dodge spam filters and reach your recipients’ inbox folder, GMass can be your best bet.

A powerful email outreach tool, GMass not only uses the world’s most trusted Gmail IP address to send emails but also helps you with custom tracking domains and its automated spam solver.

So why not try out GMass today to enjoy better email deliverability?

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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We need to make sure you know how to start a cold email.

Why? Because you know what everyone hates? Lazy cold emails.

You know the type. Those cookie-cutter emails that are lifted directly from templates.

They want to sell you something, and that’s all they focus on — you know because you’ve received tons of them.

And you can judge them by the first line alone.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with emailing someone cold. It’s a fantastic way to reach out to prospects at scale.

However, there’s a right way of doing it — cold email copywriting is an art, after all.

And acing the start of your cold email is an excellent place to begin.

So what do you do?

Step 1 of how to start a cold email: Establish your goals

Before you even begin writing your email, you need to clear up something very important:

What are you looking to accomplish with this cold email?

Is it selling a product or service?

Is it trying to build a relationship with someone?

Establishing this clear goal is vital, as it’s going to shape what your email looks like.

Remember, cold emails have very low reply rates.

And for good reason.

Your recipients are receiving an email from someone they don’t know.

Why should they bother with it?

To maximize your chances of getting noticed and receiving a reply, determine what you want your cold email to achieve and ensure that everything in your email contributes to this objective.

For example, if you’re sure the prospect is a qualified lead that really needs your product/service, consider including a pitch in your cold email.

You can then clearly describe what you’re offering to maximize your chances of getting a conversion.

However, if you’re unsure of this, leave out the pitch until you get a response from the recipient. Keep your first email centered around building a relationship with that prospect.

Naturally, this is going to result in a very different email.

As you’re not pitching something directly, you don’t need to detail what you’re offering and how it can benefit them. You can keep that for your next email once you’re sure that they’re a qualified lead.

Step 2 of starting your cold email: Get your subject line sorted out

Your “From” line is probably the first thing your recipients will notice.

But your subject line is a close second.

So pay special attention to getting it right, too.

And unfortunately, this can be trickier than it sounds!

Do NOT opt for gimmicky subject lines.

What do I mean by that?

I’m talking about adding multiple exclamation marks, using ALL CAPS, AlTeRnAtInG cApS, or words like “guaranteed” and “100%,” and so on.

And take a look at this subject line, for example:

Sure, you might open it out of curiosity, but it’s highly unlikely that you will take it seriously!

The body copy of the email that follows clearly shows that it’s lifted from a template.

Look, we’ve all received clickbait emails with subject lines like this in the past.

And what do most of us do the moment we see them?

Mark it as spam and send it straight to our trash.

Please don’t make the same mistake in your emails.

Opt for a fairly simple and short subject line that clearly expresses what your email contains and why it’s relevant to the recipient. Remember to include their name in your subject line to help it stand out among the sea of other generic cold emails they receive.

The moment someone sees their name, they believe that the email was tailor-made for them — increasing your email’s chances of getting opened.

If you want some examples of good email subject lines, here are 40+ subject lines you can start using right away.

Step 3 for starting a cold email: Ace your email greeting

Most people overlook how important email greetings are.

After all, it’s just a “hi” or “hello,” right?

How important could that be?

Well, as it turns out, it’s vital!

Remember, your greeting is still part of your email, and it sets the tone for the rest of your email.

Always try to address a recipient personally to stand out from the other generic cold emails they receive.

Don’t opt for a simple “Hi” or “Hello.”

If you know the name of the person you’re cold-emailing, take advantage of that.

Make it: “Hi Martin,” or “Hello Rebecca.”

It’s going to show them that this was an email specifically crafted for them — and they aren’t part of some massive email list receiving bland, mass emails.

If you’re looking for more insights on email greetings, check out my ultimate guide to email greetings.

Step 4 of opening a cold email: Establish how they got on your radar

Now you can actually start your cold email.

Finally!

Remember, your recipient doesn’t know who you are.

They haven’t interacted with you before.

So it makes sense for you to clarify why you’re emailing them.

Doing this is incredibly important as it’s going to show them that this wasn’t isn’t just a random cold email. There was a specific reason why you wanted to email them in particular.

An excellent way to do this is by complimenting/referencing something related to:

Their achievements
Their company

It’s a simple way to instantly build familiarity even though you’ve never interacted with them before. As you’re referencing something they did or are part of, you’ve established common ground and have a legitimate reason to reach out to them!

For example:

Hi Richard,

I recently read the insightful article you wrote about the future of e-commerce in PublicationX, and was blown away by your findings.

Why does this opening line work?

It compliments them on something they did — and who doesn’t love compliments?
It references something recent — which shows them that you’re genuinely interested in what they do.

By doing this, you’re not going to be viewed as a generic spammer who’s merely trying to sell them something.

You’re someone who’s fascinated by what they do and simply wanted to reach out.

But what if your cold email’s goal was to pitch to them? Should you still use this approach?

Yes!

Even if you’re planning to include a pitch in your cold email, never start with it.

Failing to establish a connection is a sure-fire way to let your recipients know that you don’t care about them — you only care about their money.

And that’s never a good idea!

Step 5 of how to start your email: Introduce yourself

Now that you’ve created some common ground, you can introduce yourself and why you’re emailing them.

When introducing yourself, try and connect it with whatever you referenced earlier to make it more meaningful.

Let’s build on the example I mentioned earlier:

Hi Richard,

I recently read the insightful article you wrote about the future of e-commerce on SiteX and was blown away by your findings.

My name is Ajay, and I’m the head of growth for e-commerce SiteY. I wanted to reach out to you because we collected some interesting data findings on customer behavior on our site, and I thought you’d be interested in it.

Why does this work?

It plainly specifies who I am and what I do.
It establishes a clear reason for contacting him.

Now that you’ve established who you are and why you’re emailing them, you’ve aced the start of your email!

How to start a cold email: Wrapping up

Starting cold emails can be tricky — but it isn’t impossible!

As long as you’re not overly promotional in your email’s introduction, you’ll have no trouble connecting with your email recipients. Additionally, always remember to personalize your cold emails to increase your chances of getting noticed.

And the easiest way to do this is by using GMass’ automatic personalization. GMass can automatically customize your subject lines, email greetings, and even your email body to save you the trouble of doing all this manually.

So why not sign up for GMass today to start your emails the right way and make your cold emails a success?

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge all in one tool — that works inside Gmail

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Want to resend an email in Gmail?

In this article, I’ll show you four different ways to resend your Gmail emails — using the Compose, Reply, Forward, and Templates features.

Once I’ve covered how to resend an email in Gmail, I’ll also show you how to do it in Outlook. Then, I’ll go over some reasons for resending emails and share four handy tips to help ensure that your re-sent emails are successful.

Further Reading:

Want to learn how to undo send, use Gmail keyboard shortcuts, and more? Check out the 20 best Gmail tips and tricks.

Also, read my step-by-step guide on scheduling emails in Gmail’s web, Android, and iOS apps (iPhone and iPad).

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

How to Resend an Email in Gmail
How to Resend an Email in Outlook
Why Resend Emails?
4 Simple Tips to Ensure That Your Re-sent Emails Are Successful

Let’s jump right into it.

How to Resend an Email in Gmail

There are mainly four ways to resend an email in Gmail:

Using Gmail Compose.
Using Gmail Reply.
Using Gmail Forward.
Using Gmail Templates.

First, I’ll walk you through how to resend emails in Gmail using its Compose feature.

A. How to Resend Emails Using Gmail Compose

One way to resend an email is to copy the original message to a New Message window and then send it as a brand new email.

Follow these steps to resend emails this way:

Step 1
Go to gmail.com and sign in to your account.

Step 2
Click on the Sent folder (outbox) from the Main Menu on your left.

Step 3
To find your sent Gmail emails quickly, enter any related keywords in the Search Mail bar at the top and click Search.

Alternatively, you can just skip step 2 and use the search bar directly from your inbox.

Step 4
From the results displayed, click on the right email to open it.

Step 5
Copy the body of the email.

Step 6
Click Compose from the Main Menu, and a New Message window will open.

Step 7
Paste the copied content into the Gmail message body. Then, add the recipient email address in the To field, enter the email Subject line, and hit the Send button.

Note: Until you click the Send button, the message will remain in the Drafts folder.

Simple enough, right?
However, manually copy-pasting the entire message can be tiring, especially if you want to resend multiple emails.

What about any attachments?
Gmail users can’t just copy files from an email the same way you copy the message content.

And that’s another limitation of using the Compose feature to resend emails. You’ll have to manually add and upload any attachments when drafting your email to resend.

Next, I’ll show you how to resend emails using the Gmail Reply feature.

B. How to Resend Emails Using Gmail Reply

Follow these steps to resend Gmail emails using the Reply feature:

Step 1
Log in to the Gmail app and click on the Sent folder from the Main Menu. The words “in:sent” will appear in the Search mail bar.

Step 2
Enter any related keywords in the Search mail bar and click Search to find the original email quickly. From the results displayed, click on the email you want to resend to open it.

Step 3
Click the Reply arrow on the top right. In the Compose window that pops up, click the horizontal ellipsis icon to show trimmed content.

Step 4
Select the timestamp and other lines at the top, and delete them.

Step 5
Select the remaining part of the text and press ‘Ctrl + [’ on your keyboard to remove the indentation of the sent message. Adjust the formatting if necessary.

Step 6
Open the Type of response drop-down menu from the left corner of your message tab and then click Edit subject to open a separate window for your email.

Step 7
Now add or delete email recipient details from the To field (as if it were a brand new email) and click Send.

Like the Compose method, you’ll need to include attachments manually when resending emails using the Reply feature.

Go back to Contents

Next, I’ll cover how you can resend Gmail emails using the Forward feature.

C. How to Resend Emails Using Gmail Forward

Using Gmail’s Forward emails feature is the easiest way to resend emails with attachments.

Here are the steps for resending emails as forwarded messages:

Step 1
Log in to Gmail and click on the Sent folder from the Main Menu.

Step 2
Open the email you want to resend.

Step 3
Click Forward to open a separate window for your email.

Step 4
Click Edit subject under the Type of response drop-down menu.

Step 5
Select the timestamp and other header lines at the top and delete them.

Step 6
Modify the email Subject line field, add email recipient details in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields as required. Then, click Send.

This way, all attachments from the previous email are automatically included with the forwarded messages.

However, there are a few caveats:

When you forward emails, you may have to manually delete a lot of email content and attachments if the email you’re forwarding was part of a long thread of emails.
With the forwarding method, you can’t forward multiple emails at once.

What if you want to resend specific emails to multiple recipients over some time?
Next, I’ll show you how you can use the Templates feature to resend multiple messages.

D. How to Resend Emails Using Gmail Templates

It’s too much of a hassle to comb through the Sent folder when you’re looking for specific emails to resend.

Fortunately, Gmail users can create email templates to reuse in the future.
Here’s how to do it:

i. How to Enable Gmail Templates

Step 1
Open Gmail and click on the Settings icon (gear icon) on the top right.

Step 2
Click on See all settings.

Step 3
Click Advanced.

Step 4
Navigate to the Templates section and click the radio button next to Enable.

Once you’ve enabled Templates (also known as canned responses), you can save a composed message as a template to reuse in the future.

ii. How to Save a Message as a Template

Here’s how you can save a message as a template:

Step 1
Compose the email you want to save as a template using Gmail Compose.

Step 2
Click on the three dots icon next to the trash icon for more options.

Step 3
Click on Templates > Save draft as template > Save as new template.

Step 4
In the pop-up window that appears, enter a name for your new template and click Save.

After you’ve saved a template, you can easily reuse it in your next email.

iii. How To Use Templates To Resend

To use a template to resend an email, just follow these steps:

Step 1
Open a Gmail Compose window.

Step 2
Click on the three dots icon for more options.

Step 3
Click Templates and select the template that you saved previously.

Step 4
Gmail will automatically paste the template you selected into your outgoing email. Click the GMass button to send out your email.

Note: You can save up to 50 templates without downloading any third-party extension or switching email clients.

There you have it — four ways to resend emails in the Gmail app!

Go back to Contents

Now, I’ll show you how you can resend an email in Microsoft Outlook.

How to Resend an Email in Outlook

Resending emails in Microsoft Outlook is quite similar to doing it with a Gmail account.

You can either copy-paste the original content to a new email or use Reply/Forward from the Reply option menu to resend emails. Since the copy-paste method is pretty straightforward, let’s see how to use Outlook’s Reply or Forward feature to resend emails.

Note: The steps are nearly the same whether you’re using Outlook for Mac, Windows, or the mobile app.

Here’s how to resend emails using Outlook’s Reply option or Forward feature:

Step 1
Go to outlook.com and sign in.

Step 2
Click the Sent Items folder from the left sidebar.

Step 3
Once you click on Sent Items, enter related keywords in the Search bar at the top, and hit Enter.

Step 4
From the results displayed, open the right email and click Forward at the bottom of the email.

Note: You can also click Reply and proceed with the same steps. However, you’ll have to manually add attachments if you’re using the Reply feature to resend emails.

Step 5
A new window will open. Select the timestamp and other header lines on the top and delete them.

Step 6
Add a recipient address in the To field, modify the Add a subject field as needed, and hit Send.

As I’d mentioned above, you can also resend an email in Outlook the old-fashioned way — using the copy-paste functions.

Copy-paste the body of the email you’ve sent to a New Message body, attach files and add new recipients manually. Then, just resend your email the same way you send a brand new message.

Go back to Contents

If you’re still unsure about how these techniques can help you, I’ll cover a few reasons for resending emails next.

Why Resend Emails?

Whether you use Gmail or Outlook’s email service, you’ll want to resend an email at some point. It could be a registration confirmation email, a verification email, or an older email campaign that you’re resending.

Here’s a closer look at why you might want to resend emails:

1. Saves Time

Let’s say your last campaign for a product worked well, and you want to approach another set of people on your mailing list with the same message.

Resending an email is easier than creating the same message from scratch.

You could simply reuse a template from older emails or campaigns and save a ton of time. Similarly, resending an email is an easier way to remind someone about something than drafting an entirely new email message for them.

2. Improve Engagement

Whether you send promotional emails or casual email messages, you’ve probably been in situations when the recipients missed your original email altogether.

In such cases, resending emails to those recipients who haven’t opened your older emails presents another opportunity to engage with them.

If you’re an email marketer and recipients have unread copies of your emails in their mailbox, resending a mail may increase your chances of getting their attention.

Note: Remember not to spam the recipients with your emails as it can lower your sender reputation and email deliverability. This can lead to all your emails ending up in their spam folder.

Go back to Contents

But remember, resending an email doesn’t guarantee that your recipient will open it.
It just gives them another opportunity to do so.

To help you boost engagement, I’ll highlight some ways you can improve the effectiveness of your re-sent emails.

4 Simple Tips to Ensure That Your Re-sent Emails Are Successful

To ensure that your recipients open your emails the second time around, you may need to consider a few things:

1. Tweak Your Subject Line

Your subject line is the first thing your recipient will see, so it has to be perfect.

For effective emails, opt for simple, concise subject lines that draw the reader into your message.

But finding a subject line you like isn’t enough.

If you’re running an email marketing campaign, it makes sense to run A/B tests where you test different subject lines on your audience.

For example, you can send an email with the subject line “increase your reach on Facebook” to one segment of your mailing list. And send the same email with the subject line “Get more customers through Facebook” to the other.

You can then compare how both emails performed to determine which subject line had better traction.

If you’re looking for some sample subject lines to use, check out my article on 43 great cold email subject lines.

2. Consider Resending Your Email At a Different Time

It’s essential to consider the time of day you’re sending your email because timing plays a huge role in email engagement.

If your first email didn’t get the response you wanted, consider sending it at a different time. Some research suggests weekends are great for sending emails, while other studies show that early morning or late night on weekdays are ideal.

Although there is a lot of contradictory information out there as to what the perfect time is, you can find the time that suits your mailing list best.

How?
By using the A/B testing method.

For example, you could send emails to half your mailing list on the weekend and send emails to the other half during the week. Based on each group’s engagement, you can determine whether weekends or weekdays are best for sending future emails.

3. Give Your Recipients a Chance To Respond

Technically, this isn’t a tip on resending emails, but it’s still crucial.

Too many people jump the gun when it comes to following up on an email. They don’t receive a response within 24 hours and assume the recipient has missed it. They then proceed to shoot them another email.

A good rule of thumb is to wait about three days before resending an email. Most people respond to emails by this time. And if you still haven’t received a response or a read receipt notification (if you have a Google Workspace business account), a follow-up might make sense.

4. Consider Using a Dedicated Email Tool

The problem with resending emails is that you might have to send multiple messages at the same time.

And when you have to test different subject lines and sending times, forward multiple emails, and keep track of when you’ve sent emails, it can all seem very daunting.

That’s why it makes sense to use a dedicated email tool like GMass to simplify the process.

What’s GMass?

GMass is an email outreach platform that works inside Gmail. Its superior mail merge features and ease-of-use make it a popular tool with employees in large companies like Google and Uber and social media giants like Twitter and LinkedIn.

The tool is also a perfect fit for solopreneurs, small businesses, and even churches to send emails to their target audience.

To get started with GMass, just download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

Why You Should Use GMass to Resend Your Emails

With this mail merge tool, each email you send automatically goes into the Templates drop-down menu, which you can access from the GMass Settings window.

Here’s how simple it’s to load, filter, edit and manage GMass’ campaign templates:

A. Loading GMass Templates

Here’s how to load a template in GMass:

Step 1
Open the Gmail Compose window and click on the GMass drop-down arrow.

Step 2
A pop-up window will appear. Click on the Templates drop-down arrow and select your chosen template.

Step 3
When you’ve selected a template, the Compose window’s Subject and Message will get automatically populated.

But what if you have a lot of templates saved?
In that case, I’ll show you how you can sort through them.

B. Filtering GMass Templates

Here’s how easy it is to filter your GMass templates:

Step 1
Type a few characters to filter campaigns with matching subject lines or names.

Step 2
Enter the number of recipients to narrow down to campaigns with that many recipients at least.

C. Editing Templates

You can easily edit a template by modifying the email in the Subject or Message area.

Alternatively, click the HTML option to edit the HTML code behind the campaign if you want more control.

This way, you can add design elements to your emails that the Gmail Compose tools might not support (for example, HTML tables).

Interested in learning more about handling HTML message parts in your email?
Check out my post on the quirky handling of HTML and plain text message parts by the Gmail API.

D. Managing Templates

You can easily manage which campaigns show up in the Templates drop-down.

Simply go to the Templates section of the dashboard and uncheck any saved templates you don’t want to see.

That’s not all.

Here are some more ways GMass helps you:

Automated Follow-up emails: Send automated, personalized follow-ups instead of resending copy-pasted messages that you have to customize manually.
Overcome Gmail’s sending limits: Ordinarily, you can’t send more than 500 emails a day using Gmail (2,000/day with Google Workspace account). GMass allows you to bypass these sending limits when connected with an SMTP server like SendGrid.
Campaign Reports: Get detailed reports on how many people opened, clicked, and replied to your Gmail message. GMass also sends you an email notification when a report is ready to view.
A/B Testing: Vary your subject line and email body using different content sets and see which version gets you the best results.
Reply Management: You can automatically categorize your incoming Gmail messages to avoid inbox clutter.
Gmail Mobile App Add-on: Get powerful email outreach capabilities on your Android smartphone with the GMass add-on for the Gmail app.

Note: The mobile app add-on is currently not available for iOS (iPhone and iPad).

Go back to Contents

Final Thoughts

Resending emails in the Gmail or Outlook email client is a clever way to save yourself tons of time and effort. Additionally, if you’re an email marketer, resending promotional emails as follow-ups is an effective way to target unresponsive subscribers and increase engagement.

But the process can be tedious — you have to edit your message manually and resend it to each person.

Fortunately, sending automated recurring emails to any recipient or subscriber is super easy with GMass! Its powerful email marketing features and advanced customization make it the perfect tool to amp up Gmail’s capabilities.

Sign up for GMass today and join the likes of companies such as Google and Twitter to start resending your best emails today!

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Searching for excellent ActiveCampaign alternatives?

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing tool packed with email marketing automation and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) capabilities.

While ActiveCampaign is offered as a one-stop email marketing solution, it does have its downsides and may not be the right online email marketing tool for everyone.

To help you choose a better tool, I’ll highlight the top five ActiveCampaign alternatives in this article. I’ll cover their key features, pros, pricing, and limitations to give you a comprehensive view of each software option.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to that specific section.)

What Is ActiveCampaign?
Top 5 Alternatives to ActiveCampaign

Let’s get rolling.

What Is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a versatile email marketing platform and CRM tool designed for small and mid-sized businesses.

It comes equipped with powerful marketing features such as marketing automation, SMS message marketing, and a drag-and-drop email editor.

But before I cover the alternatives, here’s an overview of ActiveCampaign’s key features, pricing plans, and limitations.

Feel free to skip ahead to the alternatives section.

Key ActiveCampaign Features

Build ActiveCampaign automation workflows to send automatic responses to specific triggers on your website.
Send personalized messages and bulk emails to large audiences.
Analyze user behavior on your website and segment your mailing list based on user page views, contact details, etc.
Automatically create lead scores based on custom criteria to prioritize leads and convert prospects into customers.
Test different subject lines and email content to determine what works best.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign offers four paid plans:

Lite: starts at $15/month – supports up to three users + unlimited emails + subscription forms + marketing automation workflow + live chat and email support

Plus: starts at $70/month – offers all “Lite” features + supports up to 25 users + CRM with sales automation tool + landing page builder + integrations + dynamic content, and more

Professional: starts at $159/month – includes all “Plus” features + supports up to 50 users + predictive sending + conversion attribution reporting + split automation features, and more
Enterprise: starts at $279/month – supports all “Professional” features + unlimited users + custom reporting, and more

ActiveCampaign Limitations

While ActiveCampaign is a popular tool, it comes with several downsides:

Unlike other email marketing tools that offer a forever free plan, ActiveCampaign does not have a free plan.
Since ActiveCampaign comes loaded with advanced features, it can be overwhelming for new users to navigate and access its various functionalities.
There’s no phone support for the lower-tier plans. It’s reserved only for customers who opt for the Enterprise plan (starting at $279/month).

Read my in-depth ActiveCampaign Review for more information.

Top 5 ActiveCampaign Alternatives

Here are the top five ActiveCampaign alternatives available today:

GMass
SendGrid
Sendinblue
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Salesforce Email Studio

To help you zone in on the right tool for your needs, I’ll highlight each tool’s key features, pros, pricing, and limitations.

1. GMass

GMass is an advanced email marketing and marketing automation platform that works inside Gmail. Its powerful outreach capabilities and ease-of-use make it a popular tool used by employees at Google and Uber, as well as social media giants like Twitter and LinkedIn.

GMass’ versatility also makes it the perfect tool for casual Gmail users, SMBs, and even churches to send emails to their recipients.

Key GMass Features

1. Automatic mass email personalization

Sending personalized emails to your customers can improve their customer experience to boost engagement. However, if you have an extensive subscriber list, manually personalizing hundreds of emails could take forever.

GMass can auto-personalize bulk emails by automatically adding recipient names, personalized paragraphs, images, links, and more.

This way, you can send relevant content to a broader audience with minimal manual input!

2. Automated follow-ups

Sending follow-up emails is a smart way to increase customer engagement.

But what if you have a massive mailing list?

Don’t worry.

GMass lets you set up automated workflows to send follow-up emails until you get an email open, a click, or a response from the recipient.

You can also customize everything about these follow-up emails, including:

The content of the follow-up message
The number of follow-ups to be sent
The time interval between follow-ups
The trigger for sending a follow-up email

3. Email analytics and reports

Each time you send an email campaign, GMass generates a detailed Campaign Report describing your campaign performance.

The report highlights core email metrics like:

Total recipients to whom the campaign was sent
Unique opens and clicks
Reply and unsubscribe rate
And more

GMass’ Campaign Report gives you a better understanding of how your campaign performs and offers valuable real-time insights on when to improve your email marketing efforts.

4. Email list builder

It’s incredibly easy to create massive email lists from scratch using GMass’ Email List Builder feature.

Enter keywords (related to the segment of customers you wish to approach) in the Gmail Search bar and hit Search. For example, type in “enterprise” to identify all the emails you’ve sent to customers that contain the word “enterprise.”

Once the quick search results are displayed, GMass lets you quickly build an email list from those results — and automatically adds the email addresses to a new email’s To address field.

Check out this article for more information.

5. Schedule mass emails

With GMass, you can schedule bulk email marketing campaigns in advance to ensure optimal engagement.

Just compose your message, and then schedule it. When the time comes, GMass will automatically send out your email campaign.

This is particularly useful to email marketers because:

You can systematically plan your email campaigns well in advance.
You don’t need to be online when the campaign gets sent, helping you deal with time zone differences.
You can approach your subscribers at those optimal times when they’re most likely to respond.

To use GMass, just download the Chrome extension, and sign up with your Gmail account.

GMass Pros

Intuitive user interface that works right inside Gmail
Helps you optimize your deliverability rate for bulk emails
Send cold emails and drip campaigns directly from your Gmail inbox
Can effortlessly integrate with Salesforce CRM to manage your contacts and mailing lists
Can retain older emails as templates that can be reused anytime as the basis of your next campaign
GMass can detect a receiver’s first name automatically from their email address
Bypasses most pixel tracking blockers to give you accurate email tracking metrics
Integrates with Google Sheets to help drive your mail-merge campaigns from inside Gmail
Access email marketing capabilities from your smartphone using the mobile add-on for the Gmail Android app

GMass Limitations

Desktop version only works on Google Chrome
Requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account to function

GMass Pricing

GMass offers three broad pricing plans:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

2. SendGrid

SendGrid is an email marketing and SMTP service that can improve your email deliverability for bulk email campaigns. The cloud-based platform also allows you to send transactional emails with ease.

Check out my in-depth SendGrid review.

Key SendGrid Features

Integrate email lists, email validation, and dedicated IP capabilities to send effective bulk email campaigns.

Set up automatic emails based on user-interactions on your website, web app, or mobile app. For example, an ecommerce website can send customers cart abandonment updates as automatic emails.

Create personalized emails using the built-in email library as well as the drag-and-drop HTML editor.

Track your email performance in real-time with metrics like emails delivered, unique opens and clicks, and bounce rates.
Connect to other robust tools like Zapier and Google Cloud Platform for better functionality.

SendGrid Pros

Customer support through email, phone, or chat to assist you with any email campaign roadblocks
Scalable email marketing platform that can give you reasonable email deliverability rates
Powerful email API capabilities to send emails effortlessly from your website or mobile app

SendGrid Limitations

Basic plan lacks many essential features like email marketing automation.
User-interface can be confusing to use, making it hard for novice users.
Pricing may not be cost-effective for small businesses.

SendGrid Pricing

SendGrid offers three pricing plans:

Free: supports 2,000 contacts + 6,000 emails/month + segmentation capabilities + A/B testing (split testing) + 1 sign up form
Basic: starts at $15/month — supports 5,000 contacts + 15,000 emails/month + all “Free” features except marketing automation + 5 signup forms + customer support via chat
Advanced: starts at $60/month — supports 10,000 contacts + 50,000 emails/month + all “Basic” features + marketing automation + dedicated IP + customer service via phone

3. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an email marketing service and marketing automation tool. The software also supports transactional emails, CRM functionality, landing page support, Facebook Ads management, and more.

Check out my in-depth Sendinblue review.

Key Sendinblue Features

Manage your contact lists within the email marketing platform based on specific client characteristics.
Increase email engagement by targeting your customer base through customized ads on social media marketing platforms like Facebook.
Send personalized SMS marketing campaigns to a targeted audience of potential customers.
Set up customizable transactional emails as automated responses based on customer behavior on your application or service.

Sendinblue Pros

Straightforward interface that’s relatively easy to learn and use
All-in-one solution for a wide variety of email marketing needs like list management, email automation, newsletter creation, etc.
Offers a free plan that works well for teams with limited budgets

Sendinblue Limitations

Key email marketing features like A/B testing and advanced marketing analytics cost extra when you’re using the basic Lite plan
Can be challenging to set up as you may have to set preference details, create complex automated workflows, import active contacts into the tool, etc. just to get started
Multiple-user access available only in the Enterprise plan

Sendinblue Pricing

Sendinblue offers a free plan and four paid pricing plans:

Free: offers 300 emails/day + SMS campaign management features + unlimited contacts + Zapier integration
Lite: starts at $25/month — offers 100,000 emails/month + all “Free” plan features + removes daily email sending limit
Premium: starts at $65/month — offers 1,000,000 emails/month + all “Lite” plan features + landing page + Facebook Ads + live chat + unlimited automation
Enterprise: contact Sendinblue for a custom quote — offers all Premium plan features + priority customer support + dedicated account manager

4. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a powerful marketing automation platform that works well for large marketing teams and businesses. It’s a great marketing suite that comes with free CRM support to manage and segment your contacts.

Key HubSpot Marketing Hub Features

Pre-made templates and custom workflows help with marketing and sales automation.

Send personalized emails with custom subject lines and email content to increase engagement.

Access detailed email performance metrics like landing page and email statistics, contact performance, and so on.

Format your emails to work effortlessly with mobile devices.
Create a shared inbox to access the different types of team-wide emails from one place.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pros

Easy integration with HubSpot CRM and Salesforce to manage your contacts and mailing lists with ease
Quickly visualize and manage your marketing funnel or sales funnel
Streamlined marketing automation set-up and website builder to run quality campaigns

HubSpot Marketing Hub Limitations

Pricing plans spike very quickly with disproportionately low increases in the number of contacts allowed. For example, it goes from $50/month for 1,000 contacts to $890/month for 2,000 contacts.
User-interface and marketing functionality can be challenging to use since the solution comes with an overwhelming suite of marketing options and features.
Users can’t send out cold emails using HubSpot tools as it violates their user policies.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a free plan and three paid pricing tiers:

Free: supports 1,000 contacts + CRM + landing pages + list segmentation feature + team email + live chat + reporting dashboard + messenger integration + HubSpot mobile app

Starter: starts at $50/month — supports 1,000 contacts + all “Free” plan features + email health insights + ad retargeting

Professional: starts at $890/month — supports 2,000 contacts + all “Starter” plan features + phone support + content strategy + multi-language content + marketing automation + Salesforce integration
Enterprise: starts at $3200/month — supports 10,000 contacts + all “Professional” plan features + adaptive testing + event based segmentation + YouTube integration, and more

5. Salesforce Email Studio

Salesforce Email Studio is a cloud-based email marketing tool with automation capabilities. This software for email allows you to leverage your customer data to help you create smarter email campaigns.

Key Salesforce Email Studio Features

Schedule emails at scale to reach customers at the optimal times.

Access detailed email performance metrics.

Segment your customers on the basis of specific criteria, and send out targeted email campaigns for improved campaign effectiveness.

Create responsive, mobile-optimized smart content to reach email users on any device.
Use the drag-and-drop interface to create content that better engages your segmented subscribers.

Salesforce Email Studio Pros

Create, personalize, and send bulk email campaigns, targeted emails, and transactional emails.
Capabilities like the automation feature, dynamic messages, and data import and export help you drive effective email marketing campaigns.

Salesforce Email Studio Limitations

Every pricing tier is expensive and may not be budget-friendly for small businesses.
Navigating the platform can be difficult due to the wide range of features available.
You can send emails to a maximum of 5,000 email addresses per day.

Salesforce Email Studio Pricing

Salesforce Email Studio offers four pricing options:

Basic: $400/month — includes A/B testing + API access + content builder + deployment manager + drag-and-drop smart segmentation + standard reports + transactional email messaging

Pro: $1,250/month — includes all “Basic” plan features + automation studio + landing pages + email conversion tracking + high priority email messaging + analytics + sender authentication package

Corporate: $3,750/month — includes all “Pro” plan features + journey builder + SMS messaging + mobile in-app messaging
Enterprise: contact Salesforce for a custom quote — includes all “Corporate” features + shared item + shared subscribers, and more

Which one should you choose?

If you’re looking for advanced email analytics and marketing automation features, powerful personalization features, and a familiar, responsive interface, I’d recommend choosing GMass for your email marketing processes.

But if you’re one of those marketing professionals who prefers an overwhelming suite of email marketing features, you can go for an email marketing tool like Sendinblue.

Unless you’re in a large company with a big budget for email marketing, going for HubSpot Marketing Hub or Salesforce Email Studio might not be the best option for you.

However, note that these aren’t all the ActiveCampaign alternatives out there.

You can also check out other email marketing software such as SendX, AWeber, or GetResponse.

Each of these email marketing software systems is a great ActiveCampaign competitor, offering essential functionalities at an affordable price.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of email marketing options when it comes to finding an alternative to ActiveCampaign. However, software like GMass, SendGrid, Sendinblue, HubSpot Marketing Hub, and the Salesforce Email Studio are your best bets.

These tools help with marketing automation, personalization of bulk emails, email analytics, building and organizing mailing contact lists, and so much more.

If your preference is an easy-to-use tool with powerful features and advanced marketing automation capabilities, opt for GMass as your ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp alternative.

GMass allows you to schedule mass emails, set up an automation workflow for scheduled follow-ups, perform mail-merge with Google Sheets, and lots more.

So why not sign up on GMass today and take your emailing experience to the next level!

Ajay Goel

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

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We’re often asked to provide the IP addresses and domain names of the servers we use to send users’ emails. This question, however, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how GMass works.

The Default Setup: Google’s servers

Because our Chrome extension works on top of Gmail, by default, your emails are sent from your Gmail or G Suite account, using Google’s servers and, therefore, Google’s IP addresses. What are those IP addresses? Google uses a wide swath of IP addresses to send email, and some of them can be found here.

This is the default setup when you’re sending campaigns from Gmail, using your logged-in Gmail account as your From address.

If you’ve set an additional “From” address in Gmail: Either an SMTP server you set or Google’s servers

Within Gmail, you can set up additional From addresses, such that you can choose the From address from a dropdown in the Compose window. If you set up an additional From address in Gmail’s Settings, you’re sometimes forced to specify the SMTP server through which those emails should be sent, depending on the domain of the address you’re setting up. There is a precise logic Gmail uses to determine whether you need to set your own SMTP server.

It used to be that Gmail allowed you to set up an additional From address and still send that email through Google’s servers, but since about 2014, this is no longer allowed. Therefore, if you are sending “from” any other address than your Google account address, your emails might be sent through whatever SMTP server you set in Gmail’s Settings when you set up that additional “From” address.

This SMTP server will be used to send your emails regardless of whether you’re using the standard blue Gmail Send button to send an email to a coworker or the red GMass button to send an email campaign.

send settings — I’m using a From address of [email protected], and in my Gmail settings, I have set mail.silicomm.com as the SMTP server for this From address. Therefore, when using GMass, if I choose to send via “Gmail,” these emails will be sent through mail.silicomm.com.

If you’ve connected an SMTP server to your GMass account

GMass allows you to connect a third-party email service, like SendGrid, Mailgun, or Amazon SES, for example, to your account, so that you can send larger email campaigns that circumvent Gmail’s sending limits. When you connect an SMTP service to your account, you have the option to send each campaign either through Gmail or the SMTP service you connected. So, when using the GMass button to send campaigns, if you choose the SMTP server that you’ve connected, then the emails will go through that SMTP server and won’t touch Google’s own sending infrastructure.

Based on this, you might be wondering: What if I’ve set up an additional alias From address where I was forced to set an SMTP server, and I choose that From address in my Compose dropdown, and I’m using the GMass button, but I set GMass to send through the SMTP server I’ve connected to my GMass account? Will the emails go through the SMTP server I’ve set in GMass, or the SMTP server I designated in Gmail’s setting when I set up the From address?

SMTP settings — This email will go through the SendGrid SMTP server when using the GMass button, regardless of whether the From address is my default Google account or an additional From address that’s been set up in Gmail’s Settings.

The answer, as you might guess, is: The emails will go through the SMTP server you’ve connected to GMass. If, however, you’re using the GMass button and you choose the “Gmail” sending option instead of the SMTP server you’ve connected, then the emails will go through Google’s infrastructure but will still send through the SMTP server you set in Gmail’s settings tied to your From address.

Also… you can send to different domains/email providers on a case-by-case basis. For instance, if you notice yahoo.com is blocking emails from your SMTP server, you can instruct GMass to always send to yahoo.com address through Gmail’s servers. Use GMass’s Delivery Routes to specify those settings on a domain-by-domain basis.

Let’s summarize

What server is used?	From Address = Google Account	Additional From Address Setup in Gmail Settings
GMass button: Send via “Gmail” in GMass Settings or not specified	Google’s servers	SMTP server in Gmail’s Settings when you configured that From address. If Gmail didn’t make you enter an SMTP server, then Google’s servers.
GMass button: Send via “SMTP” in GMass Settings	The SMTP server you connected to GMass	The SMTP server you connected to GMass
Normal Gmail Send button	Google’s servers	SMTP server in Gmail’s Settings when you configured that From address. If Gmail didn’t make you enter an SMTP server, then Google’s servers.

If you’re sending “from” your default Google account address, you use the GMass button, and you haven’t connected your GMass account to a third-party SMTP service, your emails will always go through Google’s servers.
If you’re sending “from” your default Google account address, you use the GMass button, you HAVE connected your GMass account to a third-party SMTP service, and you choose that SMTP service for your campaign, your emails will go through that SMTP service.
If you’re sending from an “additional” From address that you set up in Gmail’s Settings, you were forced to set an SMTP server, and you use the GMass button where you choose to have the emails sent by “Gmail” in the GMass Settings box, then your emails will go through the SMTP server that you designated in Gmail’s Settings for that From address. If Gmail didn’t force you to set an SMTP server, then the emails will go through Google’s servers.
If you’re sending from an “additional” From address that you set up in Gmail’s Settings, and you use the GMass button where you choose to have the emails sent by a third-party SMTP service you’ve connected to your GMass account, then your emails will send through the SMTP service you connected to your GMass account, not the SMTP service you specified in Gmail’s Settings when setting up the From address.

How can you easily see what server is sending your emails?

Our free Email Analyzer shows you the IP address that is sending your email and the full SMTP transaction, including the reverse DNS of the sending IP address. Just compose your email as usual, choose your From address, decide in GMass whether to send via “Gmail” or a third-party SMTP service, and then click the “Email Analyzer” button.

Even if you’re not using Gmail, GMass, or any of our tools, the free Email Analyzer is available for your use to see the sending IP address, check blacklists, and ensure SPF and DKIM compliance. That means even if you’re using Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or any other ESP, you can use the email analyzer to analyze exactly how your emails are being sent.

Ajay Goel

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

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.