How to use Sendvanta

Setup checklist

A new workspace is ready to send in five steps. The dashboard shows this same checklist until you finish it.

1. Create your account and workspace. Sign up with Google or email/password, verify your email address, name your workspace, and pick a plan. You can start on Free and upgrade any time.
2. Authenticate your sending domain. Before any cold outreach, make sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC pass on the domain you'll send from — the Domains page checks all three and gives you the exact DNS records to add. See Domain setup.
3. Connect a mailbox. Any mailbox that supports SMTP works; connect IMAP too so Sendvanta can detect replies and bounces. See Connecting mailboxes.
4. Turn on warm-up and wait. For a new mailbox or domain, let warm-up run for around two weeks before real outreach. See Mailbox warm-up.
5. Import leads, build a sequence, activate. Import a CSV, write (or AI-generate) your steps, run the preflight check, and activate. Sendvanta paces everything from there.

Plans at a glance

Monthly volume is paced as a daily sending ceiling (roughly 1/25 of the monthly number — e.g. 1,200/day on Starter); the scheduler defers sends past the ceiling to the next day rather than dropping them. Paid plans unlock the unified inbox, the AI sequence generator, and AI copy variations; Growth adds a custom tracking domain; Pro adds advanced analytics and REST API access. Full pricing is on the pricing section of the home page.

Connecting mailboxes

Sendvanta sends through your own mailboxes — there's no shared sending pool. Go to Mailboxes → Connect and enter your SMTP details: email address, sender name, host, port (465 by default), and username/ password. The connection is verified live before it's saved; credentials are encrypted at rest and never shown again.

For Gmail / Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, connect via SMTP + IMAP using an app password (requires two-factor authentication on the account). One-click Google and Microsoft sign-in appears in the console but is still pending approval and can't be used yet.

Each mailbox has its own settings (open it from the Mailboxes page):

• Daily cap (1–2,000) — a ceiling, not a starting point. New mailboxes actually start at 8 automated sends/day and ramp up (see Health scores).
• Min gap between sends — spacing between consecutive sends from this mailbox. Defaults to 10 minutes.
• Send window, sender name, reply-to, and an HTML signature.

“Test” re-runs the SMTP/IMAP/DNS checks any time. Disconnecting a mailbox deletes its stored credentials immediately.

Mailbox warm-up

Warm-up is a per-mailbox toggle on the Mailboxes page. When it's on, your mailbox exchanges real emails with other warm-up-enabled mailboxes across the Sendvanta network — enabling the toggle opts you into both sending and receiving this traffic.

• Volume starts at 2 warm-up emails/day and grows by 2 for every healthy period, up to 40/day. Ramp-up only continues while the mailbox's health score stays at 70 or above.
• About 60% of warm-up emails receive a reply from the peer mailbox — the positive engagement providers look for.
• Warm-up runs around the clock, independent of your campaign send windows, and its traffic is completely separate from campaign stats — it never inflates your analytics.
• If a mailbox repeatedly fails to deliver warm-up mail, its participation pauses automatically; the card shows the reason. Toggling warm-up off and on resets it.

For a brand-new mailbox or domain, run warm-up for about two weeks before starting real outreach, and keep it running alongside campaigns.

Domain setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The Domains page checks all three for every domain you send from and shows exactly what to fix:

• SPF — checked for presence and correctness: multiple SPF records, exceeding the 10-DNS-lookup limit, and permissive +all all fail the check.
• DKIM — Sendvanta can generate a DKIM key for your domain (selector sv). Add the TXT record it gives you, click Validate, and outbound mail is signed with it from then on.
• DMARC — p=none passes the Gmail/Yahoo minimum but is flagged as a warning; aim for p=quarantine or p=reject once you've confirmed legitimate mail passes, and include a rua= address so you get reports.

DNS is re-checked continuously; a record that regresses raises an alert banner in the console. You can also connect Google Postmaster Tools from the Domains page to pull Google's own reputation and spam-complaint data for your domain.

Health scores & auto-pause

Every mailbox (and sending domain) carries a health score from 0–100, recomputed from bounce rates, provider throttles and rejections, spam complaints, inbox placement, volume spikes, and warm-up results over trailing 7- and 30-day windows.

Allowances ramp from 8 sends/day on a fresh mailbox up to a platform ceiling of 200/day per mailbox. A trailing hard-bounce rate over 5%, or 5 consecutive provider rejections, pauses the mailbox regardless of score. Auto-pauses, reductions, and resumes all appear as banners in the console (and as email alerts). You can resume a paused mailbox manually — that grants a 24-hour grace period before the next automatic evaluation.

Importing leads

Leads → Import CSV walks through three steps: choose a list and file, map columns, review results. Column mapping is auto-guessed (e.g. fname → first name) and editable. Recognized fields: email, first_name, last_name, company, title, phone — every other column can be kept as a custom field and used in your emails as a template variable.

• Rows with a missing or invalid email, duplicates (within the file or against existing leads), and suppressed addresses are skipped and itemized in the results step; you can download the rejects as import-errors.csv.
• Plan limits apply to a single import's row count and to your total active leads — the importer tells you the exact limit if you hit one.
• If a campaign is connected to the list, newly imported leads auto-enroll into it. You can stop a list source from the campaign's Leads tab.

Email verification

Verification checks whether an address can actually receive mail before you burn sender reputation on it. It's available on paid plans and uses credits: one credit checks one address, and a result is cached for 30 days (re-checking within that window is free). Starter includes 10,000 credits, Growth 30,000, Pro 60,000; extra packs are $20 per 10,000 and never expire.

Use Verify emails on a lead list to run a background job over its unverified leads — progress shows live, and you can watch valid/invalid/risky counts accumulate.

Unsubscribes & suppression

Every sequence must end with an unsubscribe link — the editor warns while you write, and activation is blocked if the final step is missing {{unsubscribe_url}}. On top of the visible link, every email carries RFC 8058 one-click List-Unsubscribe headers, so Gmail and Yahoo's built-in unsubscribe buttons work too.

Suppressed addresses are never emailed again in your workspace. Addresses land on the suppression list (Leads → Suppressions) when someone unsubscribes, when a send hard-bounces, when a spam complaint arrives via a provider feedback loop, or when you suppress them manually (select leads → Suppress, or mark a reply as an unsubscribe in the Inbox). Suppression also stops any active sequences for that address, and imports silently skip suppressed rows.

Building a sequence

A campaign is a multi-step sequence plus a schedule, a set of sending mailboxes, and enrolled leads. Sequences hold up to 20 steps; each step has a subject, a body (plain text, optionally HTML), and a delay in hours/days after the previous step.

• Threading — a step can start a new thread or send as a reply to the previous email (Re: in the same thread, always from the same mailbox). Reply-in-thread steps can leave the subject empty.
• Stops on reply — when a lead replies (detected via IMAP), their remaining steps are cancelled automatically. Out-of-office auto-replies don't stop the sequence; they pause it until the person is back (return date + a buffer).
• AI copy variations (paid plans) — tick “Vary this email's wording per recipient” and Sendvanta generates four subtle rephrasings, rotated at send time, so hundreds of identical emails don't form a spam-filter fingerprint. Variants always keep the exact same template variables as your original.
• Test send — send any step to yourself from a chosen mailbox before going live.

Template variables

Write variables as {{variable}}, with an optional fallback after a pipe: {{first_name|there}}. Standard variables:

Preflight checks your variables against your actual enrolled leads: a variable that some leads can't fill and that has no fallback blocks activation, so you never send “Hi ,”.

Conditional follow-ups

Beyond the linear sequence, you can insert conditions that branch on what a lead does: replied (or replied positively, with an AI confidence threshold), clicked a link, opened N times, bounced, went quiet, or unsubscribed. A condition watches for its trigger within a window you set, then either enters a yes-branch of up to 10 extra emails or takes an action — stop the campaign, move the lead to another campaign, wait, notify the owner, or create a follow-up task (these appear on the campaign's Leads tab).

Conditions that rely on opens or clicks require that tracking to be enabled on the campaign — preflight will tell you. Conditional sequences can be switched off workspace-wide in Settings if you prefer strictly linear campaigns.

Preflight & activation

Clicking Activate runs a preflight check and shows what will happen before anything sends: eligible and excluded lead counts, assigned mailboxes, today's capacity, and the projected first-send time. Blockers (in red) must be fixed before the button enables; warnings (in amber) are advisory. Common blockers:

• No email steps, or no leads eligible to enroll.
• No healthy, active mailbox assigned to the campaign.
• A template variable some leads can't fill (and no fallback).
• Final step missing {{unsubscribe_url}}.
• A condition that needs open/click tracking you haven't enabled.

You can pause an active campaign at any time (in-flight sends stop cleanly) and resume later. If you change schedule or mailbox settings while a campaign is live, use Regenerate on the Schedule tab to recompute pending send times.

How sending is paced

Sendvanta deliberately sends the way a careful human would, because bursts are what get senders flagged. The schedule you set is the outer boundary; inside it, several protections apply automatically:

• Send window — each campaign sends only on its chosen days, inside its window (default Mon–Fri, 9:00–17:00), evaluated in the campaign's timezone. Sends that come due outside the window are spread across the next open window, not fired at 9:00 sharp.
• Jitter — individual sends get 30 seconds to 5 minutes of random offset; launching a campaign mid-day spreads the first step across the remainder of the window instead of bursting.
• Caps — campaign daily cap (default 200), per-mailbox allowance (ramped by health), and your plan's daily ceiling all apply; whichever is hit first defers the rest to the next day.
• Spacing — a mailbox waits at least its minimum gap (default 10 minutes) between sends, and sends at most 25 emails per day to any single recipient company domain (freemail providers exempt), so you never carpet-bomb one prospect's employer.
• Rotation — when several mailboxes are assigned, each send goes out through the eligible mailbox with the most capacity left today. Follow-ups in an existing thread always use the original mailbox.
• Retries — temporary provider failures retry with increasing backoff; permanent rejections don't retry and count against mailbox health.

Inbox & replies

The unified Inbox (paid plans) collects replies across every campaign and mailbox. Replies are detected by polling each mailbox's IMAP inbox about once a minute and matched to the exact email that triggered them.

• Incoming mail is classified automatically: bounce, unsubscribe request, out-of-office, or a genuine human reply — each with the right effect on the sequence (suppress, pause, or stop).
• AI reply classification labels intent (with a confidence score), so “interested” replies stand out; you can set each conversation's disposition manually too: Interested, Not interested, Auto-reply, Unsubscribe, or Other.
• Marking a conversation as Unsubscribe suppresses the address workspace-wide.

Opens, clicks & verified visits

Open and click tracking are off by default and enabled per campaign, because tracking artifacts can hurt deliverability and inflate numbers. Sendvanta treats them honestly:

• Opens are a weak signal. Privacy proxies pre-fetch pixels, so opens are shown as directional only and never drive automated decisions on their own.
• Clicks are bot-scored. Security scanners “click” every link in corporate mail. Each click is scored on timing, link patterns, and the clicker's fingerprint, then settles into Human / Unverified / Bot after a ~30-minute verification window. Analytics splits click quality accordingly.
• Verified visits are the strong signal: add the one-line website snippet from Settings → Tracking to your site, and a click that results in a real browser session on your site is counted as a verified visit (first-party localStorage only, no cookies).
• Custom tracking domain (Growth and Pro) — serve tracking links from your own subdomain via a CNAME, configured in Settings → Tracking, so links match your brand.

Spam score & seed testing

Check spam score in the step editor runs your draft through a real SpamAssassin instance — composed as an actual email, with sample values filled into your template variables — and returns the score, the flagging threshold, and the specific rules that fired, so you can fix wording before sending. It scores content only; domain authentication is covered on the Domains page.

Seed testing (Mailboxes → Seed testing) answers the question spam scores can't: where do my emails actually land? Register a few seed inboxes you own at the providers you care about (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo…). Seeds with IMAP credentials are checked automatically every few minutes; others you record by hand. Results roll up into a readiness verdict — ready, caution, or not ready — with specific recommendations. Three or more seeds gives a meaningful sample.

Analytics

The dashboard shows workspace totals; the Analytics page (Pro) adds date, campaign, and mailbox filters, per-campaign tables with explicit denominators, per-step funnels, and the click-quality split. Numbers exclude test sends and all warm-up traffic. The philosophy throughout: replies, verified visits, and conversions are the metrics that matter — opens and raw clicks are shown, but labeled for what they are.

AI features

• Campaign generator (paid plans) — describe your product, goal, and angle, and get a complete 1–6 email sequence with sensible delays and a compliant final step. Generated copy is fully editable before anything sends.
• Step assist — generate or rewrite a single email from inside the step editor.
• Copy variations — per-step rephrasings rotated at send time (see Building a sequence). These do not count against your generation quota.
• Reply classification — automatic intent labels on incoming replies in the Inbox.

Team & roles

Invite teammates from Settings → Members (email + role; they get a link, or you can copy it). If you belong to several workspaces, the switcher at the top of the sidebar moves between them.

Billing & upgrades

Manage your plan in Settings → Plan & billing: upgrade, downgrade, cancel or resume, and update your card — all in-app. Upgrades take effect immediately; hitting a plan limit anywhere in the console (leads, imports, seats, AI) shows exactly which limit and offers the upgrade in place. Verification credit packs are purchased from Settings → Email verification and never expire. Free workspaces that stay inactive for a month may be suspended — a warning email goes out first.

API & AI assistants

REST API (Pro) — create keys under Settings → Integrations → API keys; the secret is shown once. Keys are workspace-bound, rate-limited at 120 requests/minute, and can drive campaigns, leads, verification, deliverability data, replies, and analytics. Full reference: API documentation.

AI assistants (paid plans) — connect Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok to your workspace so you can run outreach conversationally (“pause the Texas campaign”, “how did last week's sends do?”). Settings → Integrations has step-by-step guides per assistant; you approve the exact scopes on a consent screen and can revoke any assistant's access at any time. Billing, member management, and mailbox credentials are never reachable this way. Setup guide: Connect an AI assistant.

Troubleshooting

Contact support

Stuck, found a bug, or need something this page doesn't cover? Email hello@sendvanta.com — a human reads every message. Include your workspace name and, for sending issues, the campaign and mailbox involved; it usually saves a round trip.