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Bug Fix: Personalization with Google Sheets

November 2, 2015, 3:36 pm
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We've just fixed a bug that affected users connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and using personalization.

The bug: If the spreadsheet column names were "FirstName" and "LastName", and you attempted to personalize your email with {FirstName} and {LastName}, the personalization would fail, resulting in each variable being replaced with a blank.

Cause: This was due to a fault in our code that was pulling the first name and last name from the Gmail Contacts as opposed to the Google Sheets spreadsheet, since non-Sheets users can still personalize emails with {FirstName} and {LastName} if the first and last names are stored with email addresses in your Gmail or Google Contacts.

The fix: The fix has now been deployed, and we have tested and confirmed that personalization with Google Sheets for a mail-merge campaign does now work properly when the column names include "FirstName" and "LastName".
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Performance Improvement: Much faster sending now

November 18, 2015, 3:57 am
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We've implemented a concept into the GMass sending engine that software developers call "parallelism", and in the context of GMass, that means our software can now send multiple mail merge campaigns simultaneously.

Previously if one user sent an email to 500 addresses at 1:43 PM, and another user sent an email to 700 addresses at 1:44 PM, the latter sender would have had to wait a few minutes for the first user's emails to finish sending before his would begin sending. This behavior was fine when we first launched GMass a couple months ago, but as usage has grown, the frequency at which multiple users would initiate big campaigns within seconds of each other has increased.

By re-architecting our back-end, now both mass email campaigns will begin sending within 30 seconds of hitting the GMass button, and both will run simultaneously. I hope this increase in speed and efficiency leads to even greater user satisfaction!
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Let our editors proofread your mail merge campaigns before you send

November 19, 2015, 2:58 pm
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If you're using GMass to send out mass emails (mail-merge) from your Gmail account, you might also want to ensure that your text is crisp, clear, and grammatically correct. My other Gmail extension, Wordzen, edits, proofreads, and even writes your emails for you. It is also a free Chrome extension, and has a team of English experts behind it.

Like GMass, Wordzen adds a button near the Send button when you compose an email in Gmail. Click it and my team of live, human editors will correct and improve your English in about 10 minutes, 24 hours a day.

Compose your email campaign. Then "Wordzen" it to ensure perfect English.Then "GMass" it to send it!



After reviewing your corrected text, click the GMass button to send it.
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While many GMass users send emails in non-English languages, Wordzen is currently available only for emails written in English. In time, I'll add support for other languages as well.

Download the Wordzen Chrome extension here.
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New Feature: The world's best "Send Test Email" button

November 23, 2015, 4:52 am
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It's time to reload Gmail in Chrome, because we just launched the world's best "send test email" button. That's a bold claim, I know, given the plethora of email marketing tools in existence. Here is what makes ours the world's best:
  1. You can use the "Send Test Email" button to send a test to one or many email addresses.
  2. You can do so without leaving the Compose window, making it so you can send a test email, make a change, send another test, make a change, and so on.
  3. Not only can you continuously send tests while making changes, you can also easily check your email without leaving the Compose window, if you're sending tests to yourself. Just refresh your Inbox to see your test email; the Compose window also stays open.
  4. Personalization works. For example, if you've connected to a Google Sheets spreadsheet with 500 addresses including your own, and then you send a test to your own address, that test will include personalization from the spreadsheet.

If you already have GMass installed, just reload Gmail in Chrome to get the update. You'll notice a better-designed Settings panel also.

I hope this new button makes your workflow more efficient and seamless!
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Disappearing GMass button

November 27, 2015, 9:03 am
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If the GMass buttons have disappeared from your Gmail account in the last 36 hours, it's likely because Chrome has disabled the GMass extension due to a mistaken permissions change. To fix this, go to Chrome --> Preferences --> Extensions, and re-check the box next to GMass.



Technical Explanation:

On Wednesday evening, we pushed a new version of GMass to the Chrome Web Store, and this version listed "www.dev.gmass.co", which is our development server, as a website for which the extension required permissions. Because the previous version didn't request this permission, Chrome may have disabled GMass because of the new permission request. We have now pushed a fix for this to the Chrome Web Store, so that the latest version does not require permissions to our development server.
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GMass is now on Twitter!

December 3, 2015, 10:09 pm
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GMass's official Twitter handle is @GMassForGmail. Of course I wanted @GMass, but it's taken, and although it's not being actively used, my attempts to wrangle it out of the current user's hands failed. If you work for Twitter, however, and have the power to make such things happen, I would be eternally grateful.

We'll use our Twitter feed for system status notices, feature launches, to share GMass stats, and offer short tips and tricks for using GMass. Our Twitter content won't just be links back to the GMass blog, as that would be redundant. We plan on using Twitter to offer short tidbits of useful information that wouldn't be appropriate for a lengthier blog post. So if you're a fan of GMass, go follow us on Twitter now!

 


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Bug fixes for personalization and open/click tracking

December 18, 2015, 12:50 am
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We just deployed an update that fixes three bugs affecting personalization and open/click tracking.
  1. Bug: If you searched your account and then clicked the "Build Email List" button, in certain cases an email address would be populated in the To field without its corresponding first and last name. This would cause personalization with {FirstName} and {LastName} to fail or use the fallback value for these specific addresses. This would happen if the email address wasn't already a Gmail contact, meaning that person had emailed you at least once, but you hadn't yet emailed them back. This is now fixed.
  2. Bug: When connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet or building an email list from a search results, the Compose window would load in Plain Text mode rather than HTML mode. Therefore, if you typed a message and hit the GMass button, it would be sent as plain text, and opens and clicks would not be tracked, even if you had the checkboxes for Open Tracking and Click Tracking set. If you copied an HTML message from an outside source and then pasted it into the Compose window, it would only paste in as plain text. This is now fixed, and the Compose will load in HTML mode by default.
  3. Bug: When connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, if the column containing email addresses had spaces or newline characters around it, then personalization would fail on that row. This is now fixed, and personalization will work even on rows where the email address column has whitespace characters.
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Common GMass Support Issues

December 21, 2015, 9:51 am
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I've gone through my support emails recently, and these are the most frequently asked tech support questions, so if you've experienced any of the following, now you'll know why and how to resolve it:

1. Open tracking reports aren't showing up

If you had "Open Tracking" checked and still aren't getting Open Reports, it's likely because your email was sent as Plain Text rather than HTML email. This can be adjusted in the lower right corner of the Gmail Compose window here:


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We recently discovered a bug where if you started by connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet or by using "Build Email List" button, then the Compose that launched defaulted to Plain Text mode. Unless you set it to HTML yourself or you took an action in the editor, like making text bold, adding an image or hyperlink, then your email might have been sent as Plain Text and opens wouldn't have tracked.

We've now resolved this, however, so that the Compose will always load in HTML mode, so you won't need to adjust this yourself.

Some users have reported they can't find the Reports, even though they are present. There is a tiny expansion arrow to the left of the "GMass Reports" label. Be sure to click that to see the sub-Labels, which include Open Tracking, Click Tracking, and Unsubscribes.

2. Mail-merge personalization didn't work


If you used personalization variables in your Subject or Message like "FirstName" or "LastName", surrounded by of course, and the right value wasn't substituted, there are two likely causes:

a. You used the wrong personalization buttons. If you connect to Google Sheets, then two sets of personalization buttons would show under the Settings arrow: the Google Sheets personalization buttons and the standard First Name, Last Name, and Email Address buttons that you can use even when you don't connect to Google Sheets. If you used one of those buttons instead of the Google Sheets buttons, personalization could fail or default to the fallback values. We are about to improve the user experience, however, so that these buttons won't appear when you connect to Google Sheets.

Update Feb 1, 2016: Only one set of personalization buttons will now appear.

b. You connected to Google Sheets, but the column containing email addresses had a space or "newline" character before or after the email address. That would have prevented personalization from working because it prevented our code from matching that row in the spreadsheet to the actual email recipient.

Update: We've corrected for that now, however, so go ahead and fill your cells with whitespace, because GMass will still elegantly handle it.

c. You connected to Google Sheets, but your spreadsheet wasn't formatted properly. The first row in your spreadsheet should contain column headings, like "First Name", "Last Name", "Email Address", "Company", etc. The actual data should start on the second row.


3. Emails take too long to send

Our system was just too busy.

Update December 2015: This issue has been resolved. a) We re-architected a portion of our code so that sending is super-fast now. Now, your campaign should always start sending within 60 seconds, unless of course you've scheduled it for the future. We've also disabled the "Save list as" function, because it is slow, and because we're developing a feature which will eliminate the need to save a list entirely: you'll soon be able to choose the recipients of any past email campaign to load into the To field.


4. The GMass buttons disappeared

If you've experienced a disappearing GMass button, it's likely due to:

a. Conflicts with another browser extension. Several users have reported that they had Sidekick by Hubspot installed, and that prevented the GMass button from showing.

b. Extension has become disabled. In rare cases, the GMass extension may have become disabled. Type "chrome://extensions" in your address bar, and make sure the checkbox is checked next to GMass.

c. Didn't reload Gmail after installation. If you installed GMass but then didn't re-load Gmail in your browser, the buttons may not show.

d. The GMass server is down. If the GMass server has gone down, the buttons will also disappear until the server comes back up. This is rare, but be sure to check the GMass Twitter feed for any reports of outages.

5. Clicking the GMass button has no effect

It's likely that you accidentally disabled GMass by clicking a checkbox disabling JavaScript for GMass. This post details this issue, but it can be corrected by shutting down Chrome and restarting and reloading Gmail.

Stay tuned for our announcement later this week! We're releasing a feature that will let you send email campaigns to up to 10,000 people at a time!
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You can now send 10,000 emails with GMass and Gmail

December 23, 2015, 8:27 am
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This has been the hardest feature we've developed to date, but we pulled it off just in time for Christmas. It's time to reload Gmail (just hit the Refresh button in Chrome), because you can now send mass email campaigns with 10,000 emails with GMass, and GMass will distribute the emails over multiple days automatically, based on your Gmail account's sending limits.

If you have a regular Gmail account, you can send up to 500 emails per rolling 24 hours. If you have a Google Apps account, you can send up to 2,000 emails per rolling 24 hours.

For example, if you have a Google Sheets spreadsheet with 8,000 addresses, and you're sending from a Google Apps account, when you hit the GMass button, 2,000 emails will send immediately, another 2,000 will send 24 hours from then, another 2,000 48 hours from then, and the final 2,000 72 hours from then.

Remember, you have to reload Gmail in Chrome to get the GMass update that makes this possible.

GMass itself now has over 5,000 users, meaning I need to use this feature myself whenever I send an announcement to my users.

This feature is only useful if your emails are NOT time-sensitive. Most GMass announcements, like this one you're reading right now, are not time-sensitive, so I'm able to use this new capability of GMass to send GMass announcements. Rather meta, I believe!

GMass will automatically send 500/day or 2,000/day if your email campaign has more than 500 or 2,000 recipients, respectively. You can also control, however, how many go out per day with the new setting under the GMass Settings arrow. If left blank, GMass will use 500 (regular Gmail) or 2,000 (Google Apps) automatically, but you can override this by setting your own value.




Other Useful Information

1. How the timing works

Because Gmail tracks total emails sent on a rolling 24 hour basis, each subsequent batch of emails will be sent exactly 24 hours after the last email from the previous batch is sent. For example, if you send 8,000 emails on Wednesday at 2:00 PM, then the first 2,000 will be sent right away. If they finish sending at 2:15 PM, then the next batch of 2,000 will be sent at 2:15 PM on Thursday.

2. For large sends, you will notice a new alias address format in the To field of the Compose window.

If you connect to a Google Sheets spreadsheet with more than 2,000 addresses, then instead of populating the To field with all 2,000 addresses, you'll see an address that looks like:

2000-recipients-big-EJ1jKu@gmass.co

This address represents all 2,000 recipient email addresses. When you hit the GMass button, the sending to the first batch of 8,000 addresses will begin. The reason we use an alias address instead of stuffing all 8,000 addresses in the To field is because the Gmail Compose window no longer functions with 4,000 or more addresses in the To field. We also do this because even loading a few thousand addresses in the To field takes a long time and we don't like making you, the user, wait.
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3. You may want to use a "Spread out" factor of slightly less than 500 or 2000.

If you send regular one-to-one correspondence from your regular Gmail account, you may want to set your mail merge to send at say, 450 emails/day rather than 500 emails/day, so you have a buffer of 50 emails/day for your regular email correspondence. Similarly, if you're a Google Apps user, you may want to set this to 1900 instead of letting the system default to 2000.

4. This feature does not keep track of multiple campaigns.

If you're a Google Apps user and you're sending a single mass email 8,000 people, then your email will send at 2,000/day over 4 days. If you don't need to send any other mass emails for those 4 days, then this will work perfectly. If you do need to send other mass emails over those 4 days, you will need to plan for that ahead of time, and adjust the sending down to a factor of less than 2,000/day. The feature is "blind" to other campaigns you may need to send later or have already scheduled -- it will only spread the current campaign out based on the number of people in that particular campaign. It does not take other campaigns into consideration when calculating how many to send per day.

That's all you need to know to start sending larger campaigns through GMass. Contact me with any questions.
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New Feature: Check your Gmail account's quota and sending ability

December 29, 2015, 10:18 am
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We've added a button to the GMass Settings panel that shows you how many emails you've sent with your Gmail account over the last 24 hours, and how many emails you can currently send without exceeding your Gmail account's sending limits.

As a reminder, regular Gmail accounts can send 500 emails every 24 hours while Google Apps accounts can send 2,000 emails every 24 hours. These limits are detailed for regular Gmail accounts here at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22839?hl=en, and for Google Apps accounts at https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hl=en.

Want to know how many emails you've sent over the last 24 hours and can now send?

Just click the new "Show Usage" button:


Then look at the message that is displayed at the top of your screen:











It's that easy! Now you can tell at any given moment how many emails you've sent through your Gmail account over the last 24 hours and how many you can send right now.
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How to cancel a scheduled mail merge campaign and stop it from sending

January 1, 2016, 10:57 pm
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If you have a scheduled mail merge, it will show under the "GMass Scheduled" label. To cancel and prevent it from sending at its scheduled time, just remove the "GMass Scheduled" label from the Draft, and that will prevent GMass from seeing it. The scheduled job will error out and prevent the mail merge campaign from sending.

This also applies to a large campaign that has been set to send over multiple days. If after a couple of days, you decide you don't want the rest of it to send, just remove the "GMass Scheduled" label, and further sending will be prevented.
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A hack to pull your bounces from your Gmail account

January 2, 2016, 1:58 pm
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I just deployed a hack that lets you pull bounces from your Gmail account so that future GMass mail merge campaigns skip sending to those bounced addresses. If you already have a history of sending mail merge campaigns through your Gmail account with GMass, you've likely accumulated some bounce-backs. You already get ridiculously high email delivery rates when using GMass, but avoiding repeatedly sending to bounced addresses will optimize your email delivery even further.

This is a hack, and in time we will release a better bounce handling mechanism. For now though, here's how to pull your bounce list and prevent GMass from sending to past bounces:

1. Use the Gmail search tool to search for "from:mailer-daemon@googlemail.com", and then search. This will show all of the bounce notifications you've received.



2. Next, click the GMass "Build Email List" button. This process could take a few minutes to complete if you have a lot of bounces in your Gmail account.



3. After it's done, a new message will launch with all of your bounced addressed in the To field. Simply discard this message by hitting the Trash button in the lower right corner. GMass has now captured all of your bounced addresses and added them to our internal database. Now, if you attempt to send to any of these bounced addresses, GMass will skip over them.

That's it! 

In the future, we will automate the process of plucking bounced addresses from your account and adding them to our database, so that you don't have to go through this manual process. Stay tuned for that.
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Understanding Gmail's Email Sending Limits

January 5, 2016, 8:06 pm
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...and how GMass handles these limits. If you're an email marketer using Gmail or Google Apps as your email sending platform, you probably want to understand just how many emails you can send through your Gmail account.

First, distinguish between a regular Gmail account and a Google Apps account. A regular Gmail account is an account with an address containing the domain "gmail.com" or "googlemail.com". Google Apps, the business product of Google, means your email addresses contain your organization's domain, like john@acme.com or ajay@wordzen.com. In this case, acme.com or wordzen.com is a domain whose email is controlled by Gmail. You can log in to your business's email account by way of Gmail.

What are the basic Gmail sending limits?

Regular Gmail accounts have a limit of 500 individual emails/day.

Google Apps accounts have a limit of 2,000 emails/day.

The limits I've described above apply only if you're sending individual emails to one recipient only, the kind that would be sent if you're using GMass. They apply on a rolling 24 hour basis. That means that if you have a regular Gmail account and you send 500 emails at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, and it takes 10 minutes for the emails to send, you won't be able to send any more emails until 2:10 p.m. on Thursday. Another example: if you send 100 emails from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, and 400 emails between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Wednesday, then you won't be able to send any emails until 2 p.m. on Thursday, at which time you'll be able to send a max of 100 emails. After 4 p.m., you'll be able to send more.

There are other limits in effect if you're sending say, one email with 10 email addresses in the To field, and limits if you have your account set to auto-forward, and other limits explained in the URLs referenced above.

What happens if you exceed your Gmail account limits?

If you're logged into Gmail, and your account is at its limit, this is what happens when you hit the Send button:



The message refused to send and remains as an unsent Draft in your account.

If you're using any kind of external app to send emails through your Gmail account, the app will be able to successfully connect to your account and place the email in your Sent Mail folder, however the email won't actually send. Instead, you'll get a bounce notification indicating the email hasn't been sent because your over your limit.



How can you tell how many emails you've sent over the last 24 hours?

Gmail doesn't provide an easy way of determining how many emails you've sent over the last 24 hours, other than looking at your Sent Mail folder and manually counting, but GMass calculates this for you and displays it. Click the button in the GMass Settings box to see how many emails you've sent over the prior 24 hours. This will help you determine how many emails you can send at any given time.



How does GMass manage your account's sending limits?

You can send a mail merge campaign through GMass to several thousand email recipients in one go. GMass employs several methods for sending large campaigns through your Gmail account:
  1. GMass will automatically distribute your email campaign over multiple days to avoid exceeding your account's limits. For example, if you have a Google Apps account, where your limit is 2,000 sent emails/day, and you want to send a campaign to 10,000 people, GMass will evenly distribute your campaign at 2,000 emails/day for 5 consecutive days.
  2. GMass takes into account how many emails you've sent through your account over the past 24 hours when calculating how many emails in your campaign can be sent right now. Let's say that you've sent 15 person-to-person emails through your Google Apps account in the last 24 hours, and now you're sending a 2,500 person campaign. GMass will send 1,985 emails now, and 515 emails 24 hours later.
  3. GMass will pause sending of your email campaign when it detects that you've exceeded your account limits. It does this by analyzing the number of your sent emails over the prior 24 hours and scanning for bounce notifications in your account that indicate you're over your limit. When this happens, GMass will pause your campaign and retry in one hour.
How can you re-send emails to addresses that bounced because you were over your limit?

If you received the dreaded bounce that is "from" nobody@gmail.com and says "You have reached a limit for sending mail", you may want to re-send your email to just the recipients that resulted in this bounce. You can do so by searching for "from:nobody@gmail.com" in the Search field. You can further narrow your search by Date if you like. Then click the GMass "Build Email List" magnifying glass button, and a Compose window will be launched containing the email addresses that bounced because you exceeded your limits.

Those are the fundamentals of Gmail's and Google Apps' email sending limits and how GMass navigates those limits to allow you to send large mail merge campaigns.
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New Feature: Send follow-up mail merge campaigns in Gmail

January 6, 2016, 3:24 am
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It was the number one requested feature when I polled users a few months ago...you can now send follow up campaigns based on actions your recipients have taken on previous campaigns. Want to send a follow up to everyone that DIDN'T open your last campaign? You can do that. Want to send a follow up to everyone that OPENED but DIDN'T CLICK your last campaign? You can do that too. Or maybe you just want to re-send to exactly everyone who received a previous campaign.

Just reload Gmail in your browser and you'll see the new "follow up" button next to the Search bar. It's an @ symbol with an arrow. You'll also notice that I shrank the "Build Email List" button to just a magnifying glass icon, so GMass now occupies even less of your Gmail screen real estate:


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Don't laugh -- it's the best I could come up with my limited Photoshop skills. Eventually I'll get a real designer to re-do my icons.

When you click the button, you'll get a window where you can choose your past campaign, and then the behavioral segment to which you want to send a follow up campaign. If your original campaign was based on a Google Docs spreadsheet, then GMass will connect to the same spreadsheet to allow you to personalize the follow-up with the same data.


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One another notable change after you reload Gmail: We are now hiding the standard Gmail Send button in the Compose window if it is created by a GMass operation. Meaning, if you connect to a spreadsheet or use the "Build Email List" button, then the Send button will be hidden so that you don't accidentally click it instead of the GMass button.

Also, in case you don't regularly read this blog or the GMass Twitter feed, we added a ton of updates over the holidays. Instead of gorging on Christmas cookies all day like my family, I was hunched over my laptop and coding. Here are some other recent enhancements:
  1. Send large campaigns, up to 10,000 people
  2. Pull bounces from your Gmail account
  3. New button to check your sending limits
2016 is going to be a big year for GMass. If you're a power GMass user, it's essential that you follow us on Twitter. This announcement is for follow up campaigns that you have to send manually, but what I'm working on next will truly blow you away -- automated follow-up drip campaigns, where you upload a lead list, and then we send the list a personalized message every few days until you get a response. There are lots of tools to send drip campaigns already, but none with a tight Gmail integration. Stay tuned for that!

GMass has its weak areas as well. I know that our Reporting could be much better, we don't support Google's Inbox yet, and I'm aware of GMass conflicting with other popular Gmail extensions, like Sidekick. These issues will be addressed soon.

One last thing -- if you could do me a couple small favors, it would make a huge difference for me. First, if you haven't already, write a review on the Chrome Web Store. Secondly, tell the Twitter-verse that you love GMass.
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We've changed how click tracking works to avoid false phishing detection

January 24, 2016, 8:59 pm
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If you've sent mail merge campaigns with your Gmail account and have used GMass's click-tracking feature, you're used to having all of your clickable URLs altered to be tracked. In certain cases, however, phishing scanners were flagging the tracked links when a URL was used for the anchor text. Many email marketing experts have already written about this issue, so I won't expound upon the history of phishing in this post.

The important change to be aware of is that GMass's click tracking feature now skips tracking on links where the anchor text itself is a URL rather than a word or a phrase.

Meaning, if your links looks like this:

Go to http://www.wordzen.com for an awesome email editing service!

where the links is a URL itself, then we won't track that link.

If your links looks like this, however:

Go to Wordzen for an awesome email editing service!

the anchor text is now "Wordzen" instead of "http://www.wordzen.com", and so GMass will track this link.

You'll also notice that if you're a Google Apps user, the clickable links now point to our new domain gm.ag instead of gmass.co.

Interestingly enough, we tested other popular email marketing services to assess how their click tracking functions worked, including MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor. Surprisingly, none of these services skip click-tracking on links where the anchor text is a URL, meaning emails sent from those services will get flagged by phishing scanners if click tracking is enabled and links with URLs as anchor text are present in the message.

I believe GMass, despite doing it differently than these other popular email marketing tools, is now implementing click-tracking the proper way. We hope that the rest of the email marketing industry will soon follow suit.
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Clearing up the confusion between the To and the Cc/Bcc address fields

January 25, 2016, 12:17 am
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We've had several users recently attempt to send their mass email campaigns from their Gmail account by putting all of their recipient addresses in the Cc field, and then hitting the GMass button. This usually does not achieve the desired result of the user.

GMass works by taking all of the email addresses in the To field and sending an individual email message to each of those addresses. So, if you have 500 addresses in the To field and then you compose your Subject/Message and hit the GMass button, 500 individual, personalized emails will get sent, one to each address. Each recipient will only see his/her address in the To line. This might be counterintuitive because if you're used to hitting the standard Gmail Send button, then you're used to seeing one email go out to all 500 people, where all 500 addresses are exposed to each other. But that's the whole point of GMass -- to split up the addresses in the To field and send one email at a time to each address.

What happens if you put one or more addresses in the Cc or Bcc field?

Each of those Cc/Bcc addresses will receive a copy of every single email message that is sent to every single person in the To field. Meaning, if you have 500 addresses in the To field, and 3 address in the Cc field, each of those 3 Cc addresses will receive 500 email messages each, one for each address in the To field. In total, this will result in 1,500 extra emails being sent from your Gmail account.

So what's the purpose of using the Cc or Bcc field then?

There may be cases where you do want to have a copy of every single message sent to a Cc address. For example, if you're a teacher sending a mass email to the parents of your 20 students with each student's grades, and each email is personalized with the parent's first name and the student's grades, you may want to Cc the principal of the school. The principal of the school will receive all 20 emails sent to the 20 parents and now has proof that the communication was sent.
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Bug fix involving scheduling mass emails in regions where time is ahead of GMT

January 28, 2016, 8:50 pm
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We've just fixed a bug that was preventing users in regions where the time is ahead of GMT from scheduling email marketing campaigns with GMass and Gmail.

If you were in such a region, generally defined as east of London in the United Kingdom, and you attempted to use the Scheduling field to schedule a mass email send for the future, you might have seen this in the date/time field:

01/29/2016 08:00am -NaN:NaN

Instead of seeing your actual time zone offset, the nonsense text "-NaN:NaN" was displayed.

This issue was due to a coding syntax error, and only affected users with a positive time zone offset. The United States and all of North America operates on a negative time zone offset, so those users would not have been affected, but users in India or China for example, would not have been able to schedule mass emails for a future time.

The issue has now been corrected, so in the example above, if you're in India for example, you would see:

01/29/2016 08:00am +05:30

I apologize to our users east of London who until now were been unable to schedule mail merge campaigns in Gmail because of this.

Be sure to reload Gmail in Chrome to get the GMass update that fixes this bug.
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Beware of the checkbox in the alert box when sending email campaigns with Gmail

January 31, 2016, 8:51 am
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If you're using GMass to send email marketing campaigns with your Gmail or Google Apps account, you have likely encountered popup alert boxes on occasion that look like this:



GMass uses these alert boxes sparingly throughout the Gmail interface to confirm certain actions that you might take. For example, if you're sending to a large number of email addresses, the alert box confirms that you didn't hit the GMass button by accident. Or, if you put addresses in Cc or Bcc, an alert box confirms your intentions since it's easy to confuse the use of Cc and Bcc when sending mail merge campaigns with Gmail and GMass.

Beware the checkbox at the bottom of the alert, however. Checking that box will disable GMass's sending functionality entirely. It may be tempting to check so that you don't have to see such alerts in the future, but the unfortunate side effect of doing so is that it cripples GMass. This is the nature of how JavaScript's alert boxes work, and until we enhance GMass with more stylish alert boxes, please do not check this box.

If you check it by mistake and find that GMass has become disabled, there's an easy fix. Simply shut down Chrome entirely, and relaunch Chrome and then reload Gmail, and GMass will be back to normal.

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Tiny enhancement: Easily view the status of an in-progress mail merge campaign

February 8, 2016, 8:13 pm
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We've just deployed a minor enhancement that lets you easily see the status of an in-progress mail merge campaign. For example, if you've scheduled an email campaign to 10,000 people, and GMass has spread the campaign's sending out over 5 days, and after day 1, you want to check its status, you can now do that just by opening up the campaign from the GMass Scheduled label.

If a campaign has partially sent, you'll get a yellow status bar after opening the campaign, letting you know how many emails have been sent and when it's next scheduled to send.

In the example below, the campaign I sent to my Wordzen users is part of a multi-day send, and the first day's batch have been sent. I simply had to open up the email from my Drafts folder or from the GMass Scheduled label to access this information.

As with all GMass updates, just reload Gmail in Chrome to get the latest version of GMass.


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Chicago Entrepreneur Targets and Converts Leads with GMass, Achieving 60% Open Rates

February 9, 2016, 4:45 pm
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You might say that Rich Levy lives by the axiom, “out with the old and in with the new.” A self-professed “functioning entrepreneur with a manageable start-up problem,” Levy has created several successful enterprises ranging from a sausage store to his latest venture, an ingenious digital liaison between restaurants and gastronomes in Chicago: www.mygiftie.com

Levy uses email marketing to light the fire and entice restaurant owners and managers to join his fellowship of foodies. He has tried all major platforms for email marketing and has seen the usual open and click rates of less than ten percent.

A few months ago he started using GMass, a new extension for the Chrome browser that transforms anyone with a Gmail account into an email marketing mastermind.

“I am routinely getting over 60 percent open and 50 percent click rates, then I set the appointments and close deals,” Richard said recently. “It’s very seamless to set up campaigns, launch them, and then track the results,” he added.

Levy believes the extraordinary results he gets using GMass are due to several factors. “I write short, personal notes to people with a one or two-word subject line. GMass personalizes each one and the recipient sees that it’s coming from me at my personal account,” Levy explained. “It’s not spam, it’s a real letter with a meaningful message from me to my customer or prospect.”

GMass is the brainchild of another Chicago entrepreneur, Ajay Goel, who also has a track record of creating successful companies. GMass's features include tracking, personalization, mail-merge, and scheduling.

A visit to www.gmass.co will prompt a visitor to “Add GMass to Chrome” and the prompts take you through installation, setup, and operation.
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