SSEMAILER · USER GUIDE

From CSV to inbox in five steps.

Everything you need to send a branded, paced email campaign from your own domain — and nothing that will get you flagged as spam. Twenty minutes the first time, five minutes after that.

START Sign in — no password, no API key

Go to ssemark.com/mailer.html, enter your work email, and click the link we send you. That's the whole login: the link works once, expires in 15 minutes, and creates your account the first time. If SSE Mark set you up, you already have an invite email with the same kind of link.

You never handle a sending key. SSEMailer sends through SSE Mark's delivery infrastructure. There is nothing to paste from Resend, no "key" screen, no script to run. Your account, your domain, your list — the plumbing is ours.

STEP 1 Sender, logo & domain

Senders & domains → Add sender. A sender is the identity your emails come from. Fill in:

FieldWhat to put
Business / sender nameYour company as customers know it — Bayview Dental.
From nameWhat shows in the inbox — Bayview Dental Team. A team name outperforms a person's name for cold outreach and keeps working when staff changes.
From emailAn address on a domain you ownhello@bayviewdental.com. Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook.com addresses are rejected: we can't authenticate them and they land in spam.
Reply-toWhere replies should land — a real inbox someone reads daily.
Mailing addressYour physical business address. It prints in every footer; U.S. law (CAN-SPAM) requires it.

Upload your logo

PNG with a transparent or white background, 400 × 120 px (it displays at 200 × 60; the double size stays sharp on phones), under 200 KB. Wide logos look best — crop the empty space. We host it, so it renders in Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail without attachments. Anything up to 800 px is resized for you.

Verify the domain

Press Save & get DNS records. You'll see three records (one TXT for DKIM, one MX and one TXT on the send subdomain). Add them at your domain registrar — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace — exactly as shown; click any value to copy it. These are additions: leave your existing records, including your regular email's MX, alone. Then press Check verification. Usually 5–30 minutes, occasionally an hour.

Also add DMARC if you don't have it. A TXT record at _dmarc with value v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com. Gmail and Yahoo require it for bulk senders. You can build campaigns before the domain verifies, but not send.

Seed mailboxes

List your own inboxes at the big providers — Gmail, Outlook.com/Hotmail, Yahoo, iCloud, AOL — plus two or three colleagues on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Free accounts take five minutes to create. You'll use these in Step 5.

STEP 2 Template

Templates → New template. The SSE Mark starter loads: header with your logo, a colored headline band, body copy, three highlight chips, a button, signature and a compliant footer. Three ways to make it yours:

  1. Look & feel — pick a color palette, header style (gradient, solid or light), corner style and font. Changes preview instantly, no code.
  2. Edit the copy in the HTML box — replace the eyebrow line, headline, paragraphs, chips and button text. The preview on the right updates as you type; switch to Mobile to check phones.
  3. Upload your own HTML — if a designer built the email, use Upload HTML file. Keep {{unsubscribe_url}} and {{company_address}} in the footer (we won't send without them) and drop {{logo_url}} where the logo goes.

Personalization tokens

Anything in double braces fills in per recipient from your CSV: {{first_name}}, {{last_name}}, {{company}}, {{city}} — and any other column in your file. Add a fallback for blanks: {{first_name|there}} becomes “there” when the name is missing. {{greeting}} gives you “Hi Maria,” or plain “Hi,” automatically. Tokens work in the subject line too.

Save. A template is reusable across every campaign, and you can duplicate one to try a different palette.

STEP 3 Your recipient list (CSV)

Export from your CRM, Excel or Google Sheets as CSV. Any layout works — we find the email column by content, not by name, and we clean the rest:

A minimal file looks like this — a header row, then one person per line:

emailfirst_namelast_namecompanycity
maria@riverafamilydentistry.comMariaRiveraRivera Family DentistryMiami
j.ortiz@harborlawgroup.comJamesOrtizHarbor Law GroupCoral Gables
List quality is the whole game. Use people who know you or have a clear reason to hear from you — customers, leads, event sign-ups, local businesses in your category. Purchased or scraped lists bounce, and bounces over 5% pause your campaign automatically. Under 2% is the goal.

STEP 4 Create the campaign

New campaign. Five boxes, top to bottom:

  1. Sender & template — pick the two you just made.
  2. Message — internal campaign name, the subject (tokens allowed: {{first_name|Hi there}}, a quick note from Bayview Dental) and the preheader, the grey line that shows next to the subject in the inbox.
  3. Recipients — drop the CSV. You'll see the row count and columns detected.
  4. Pace — how fast it goes out. Defaults are safe: 30 per batch, every 15 minutes, a daily cap set by your domain's warm-up stage, first send tomorrow at 9 AM. Set a send window (e.g. 8 hours) to keep everything in business hours — evening sends look automated. The pace note tells you today's cap and how the list will spread across days.
  5. Create campaign — cleans the list and computes the schedule. Nothing is sent yet.

The campaign page then shows how many recipients survived cleaning (and how many were invalid, duplicate or suppressed), the number of batches, first and last send time. If the daily cap was lowered by warm-up you'll see a yellow note saying so.

STEP 5 Seed, test, schedule

  1. Send to seeds — delivers the real email (real subject, real personalization) to your seed mailboxes. Open each one: is it in Inbox, Promotions or Spam? Reply to it. If it's in Spam, mark Not spam and drag it to Inbox. This engagement is what teaches the providers your domain is legitimate — do it for every campaign in the first two weeks.
  2. Send test… — a copy to yourself with a [TEST] subject prefix. Read it on your phone. Check the logo, the links, the unsubscribe link and the address.
  3. Schedule campaign — confirm the count and the dates. The whole drip is queued in the background; you can close the tab. The page refreshes itself while it works and shows Queued with Resend climbing.
Changed your mind? Cancel remaining stops every email that hasn't gone out yet — already-delivered ones can't be recalled. Cancelled recipients are refunded against your monthly plan. Drafts can be edited (subject, preheader, pace) any time before scheduling.

WHY Warm-up: the first two weeks are slow on purpose

Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo score every sending domain on its history. A domain with no history that suddenly sends 2,000 emails looks exactly like a spammer, and most of it lands in Spam — damage that lingers for weeks. So volume ramps up:

Day123456789101112131415+
Daily cap1502504007001,0001,5002,0002,5003,5005,0007,50010,00015,00020,000plan limit

The clock starts at your first scheduled send and runs by calendar day, so pausing doesn't hurt. Campaigns are capped at today's number automatically — you can always go lower, never higher — and anything over the cap rolls onto the following days. The sender page shows the stage (Not started · Ramping up · Warming · Complete), today's cap, what's queued and the next seven days.

Who to send to first

  1. People who will engage: existing customers, partners, vendors, past clients, newsletter opt-ins, your own team. Send them something worth replying to. Replies are the strongest positive signal a mailbox provider sees.
  2. Your seed mailboxes, every campaign, with the open-reply-rescue routine above.
  3. The warmest slice of your real list — recent leads, event attendees — before colder contacts.

Avoid during warm-up: cold lists of unknown quality, role addresses (info@, sales@), and changing your from-address.

TRACK Reading the results

Open any campaign to see Recipients → Queued → Delivered → Opened, with clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints underneath. Events arrive within a minute of each send. Benchmarks for a healthy B2B outreach list: delivered 95%+, opened 25–45%, clicked 2–6%, bounced under 2%, complaints under 0.1%. The Recipients table shows each person's status and send time; filter and export it as CSV for your CRM.

Bounces and complaints go to your suppression list (on the sender page) and are skipped forever after. If bounces exceed 5% after 50 sends, or anyone marks you as spam, the campaign pauses itself and cancels the rest — fix the list before trying again.

RULES What keeps you out of spam — and out of court

HELP Troubleshooting

“The sending domain isn't verified yet”

DNS hasn't propagated or a record was pasted with a typo/extra space. Re-check the values against the sender page (click to copy), wait 15 minutes, press Check verification again.

“Your plan allows N recipients per campaign / N left this month”

Split the list or upgrade under Account & plan. Usage counts recipients at the moment you schedule; cancelling refunds the unsent part.

The seed copy landed in Spam

Normal on day 1–3 of a new domain. Mark it Not spam, move it to Inbox, reply. Keep to the cap and it improves within days. If it's still in Spam on day 7, check DMARC, your list quality and whether the copy reads like an ad (all caps, “FREE!!!”, image-only).

Logo doesn't show in the preview

Upload it on the sender, not just the template, and make sure the template has {{logo_url}}. Under 200 KB, PNG or JPEG.

I need to stop a campaign now

Open it → Cancel remaining. Everything not yet delivered is pulled back within a minute.

Something else

Email Info@ssemark.com. Want SSE Mark to design the email and run the campaign for you? Start a project.

Pre-flight checklist