Emailing a group

Your free plan includes one real group email a month, to up to 10 people. Not a preview, not a demo: it goes to your actual customers from your actual address.

Ten is deliberate. If you run a one or two person shop, ten is often the whole list of people you would chase this month, so the free send is a real piece of work rather than a taster you cannot use.

The follow-up is the part that is paid, and it is the part worth paying for. Anyone can send one message to a list. The thing that makes money is the second message that goes only to the people who stayed quiet, and stops the instant somebody answers.

The allowance resets on the 1st of each month.

There are two ways in, and they end up in the same place.

The number of people you picked and the number who will receive the email are rarely the same. Someone has no address on file, someone else asked not to be emailed last year, two records turn out to be the same person. The check tells you all of it up front, with names, so you can look into anything surprising before rather than after.

It also tells you how long the send will take. A list of several hundred does not go out in an afternoon; at the default pace it runs for a couple of weeks. That is deliberate, and the reasons are in the sending limits article.

Anything in double braces gets replaced with that person's details when the message goes out:

Use the first name for greetings. "Hi Sarah" reads like a person wrote it; "Hi Sarah Chen" reads like a form letter, because that is what form letters do.

If you type a field name RadiusOS does not recognise, it warns you before you schedule and leaves the text exactly as you typed it rather than quietly deleting it.

Every group email carries an unsubscribe link and your business mailing address at the bottom. Both are legally required on marketing email, and RadiusOS adds them so you cannot forget.

You need to set your mailing address once, in Settings, before your first send. Until you do, group sends are held rather than sent without it.

Anyone who unsubscribes is marked straight away, and anything still queued for them is cancelled. They will never be included in a future group email from this workspace.

Group Email in the sidebar lists every send. Open one and you get a row per person: who it reached, who is still queued, who opened it, and who was left out with the reason next to their name.

Sample contacts are never emailed. The practice records in a new workspace carry ordinary looking addresses so the app feels real before you have typed anything in, and mail to them would reach strangers rather than customers. They are screened out of every send and reported as "sample record" in the list above.

Every number at the top is also a filter. Click Bounced and you see those people, because the next thing anyone wants after seeing a count is the list behind it.

Nothing is final until it goes. Open the send and press Edit to rewrite it, or press the x beside anyone to take them out.

Every message in the send is editable, not just the first one. If your campaign has a follow-up, it appears in the same form under its own heading, with its own subject, its own text, and a box for how many days to wait before it chases anyone who has not replied.

The one rule: changes only affect messages that have not gone yet. The screen tells you the split before you save, and a message already delivered cannot be edited or recalled by anyone.

To call the whole thing off, use Cancel this send. Everything still queued is cancelled and nobody else receives it. Once some have gone the button becomes Stop this send, because the ones already delivered stay delivered.

A send that reached nobody can be deleted outright, which takes it off the list. One that reached real people stays, because it is the record behind those emails in each person's history.

Once a send is finished its badge reads Done. Click that badge to archive it, and it moves off your active list. A message appears with an Undo button in case you clicked the wrong one.

Archived is not deleted. The send is still there, with everyone who received it and exactly what they were sent, under the Archived tab at the top of the page. Open it and choose “Put back on the list” to bring it back at any time.

Archiving is how the page stays useful after your tenth campaign. What is still sending sits at the top, finished work goes in the archive, and the list shows you what needs attention rather than everything you have ever done.

Under the page title is a line reading something like “These go out Mon to Fri, 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM PDT.” That is the schedule every group email in this workspace follows, and the Change link beside it takes you straight to it.

Every time on this page and on each campaign is printed in that same zone, with the zone named, so a send time never has to be translated in your head.

If the people on your list gave you their address, you are on solid ground. If you bought the list, read this.

In the United States you may email a list you did not build, as long as every message has a working unsubscribe link and your postal address. RadiusOS handles both. Canada and most of Europe require the person to have agreed in advance, so emailing a bought list into those countries breaks the law. RadiusOS flags addresses that look Canadian or European and offers to leave them out, though a .com address can belong to someone anywhere.

Bought lists also contain addresses that were abandoned and turned into traps. Mailing one can get your whole domain blocked, which affects every email your business sends, including your quotes and invoices.