Send outreach from your own email.

How sending works

Most cold email tools send through their own infrastructure and put your name on it. Mangos AI does the opposite. You connect a mailbox you already own, and the app talks to that mailbox's SMTP server directly from your machine at send time.

That has three consequences worth understanding before you set it up. Your sending reputation is yours, built on your own domain, and it follows you even if you stop using Mangos AI. Replies thread normally in your inbox because the conversation genuinely started there. And nothing sends while the app is closed, because there is no server holding your credentials waiting to send on your behalf.

Mangos AI (your computer)
        │
        │  credentials encrypted by your OS keychain
        ▼
  your SMTP server  ──  smtp.gmail.com, smtp.zoho.com, your host
        │
        └──  the recipient's inbox, from your address

Before you start

Which address should you use?

If you have a domain, use it. Cold email from a domain you control is far easier to authenticate and lands better than the same message from a consumer address. A personal Gmail works and is fine at low volume, but Gmail's own bulk sender rules treat @gmail.com senders more suspiciously as volume grows, and you cannot publish a DMARC record for a domain you do not own.

Connect your mailbox

In Mangos AI, open the Outreach tab, then Sending accounts and + Add account.

1. Pick your provider

   Choosing Gmail, Google Workspace, Zoho or Outlook auto-fills the host, port and TLS setting for you. Pick Custom if yours is not listed and fill them in from your host's docs.

2. Fill in the identity

   Label is just for you, so name it something like "Work Gmail". From name and From email are what the recipient actually sees in their inbox.

3. Enter your app password

   Username is almost always your full email address. The Password field takes an app password, not the password you use to log in to the web interface. See provider setup for how to generate one.

4. Add your address, signature and cap

   The physical mailing address is stapled to every email and is not optional. Set your daily send cap to the number you eventually want to reach, since the warm-up ramp will hold you well below it at first anyway.

5. Test connection

   A new account will not save until the test passes. That is deliberate: a saved-but-broken mailbox means silent failures later, when you have a queue of approved drafts waiting to go out.

Setting up your provider

Expand the one you use. If your host is not here, pick Custom in the app and read the last entry.

SMTP host  smtp.gmail.com
Port       465
TLS        on
Username   you@gmail.com
Password   the 16-character app password (spaces are fine)

SMTP host  smtp.gmail.com
Port       465
TLS        on
Username   you@yourdomain.com
Password   app password

SMTP host  smtp.zoho.com
Port       465
TLS        on
Username   you@yourdomain.com
Password   app-specific password

SMTP host  smtp-mail.outlook.com
Port       587
TLS        off      // correct, see the port and TLS rule
Username   you@yourdomain.com
Password   app password

Set-CASMailbox -Identity you@domain.com -SmtpClientAuthenticationDisabled $false

Port 465, TLS on     implicit TLS, the common default
Port 587, TLS off    STARTTLS, upgraded after connecting

The port and TLS rule

The TLS checkbox does not mean "encrypt my mail". It means "start the connection already encrypted". Getting this backwards is the single most common setup failure.

TLS/port mismatch, port 465 needs TLS on,
ports 587/25 need TLS off (STARTTLS).

Troubleshooting

Mangos AI translates raw SMTP errors into the message that tells you what to fix.

How your password is stored

The password is encrypted using your operating system's own credential store, which is DPAPI on Windows and Keychain on macOS, and kept on your machine. It is never sent to a Mangos AI server, never written to a config file in plain text, and never included in anything the app displays or exports.

The part that decides whether any of this works

A perfect SMTP config still lands in spam if your domain is not authenticated. If you send from your own domain, add these three DNS records. This is not a Mangos AI feature, it is how email works, and it matters more than anything else on this page.

• SPF. One TXT record listing who may send as your domain. For Google: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all. You may only have one SPF record, so if you already have one, merge into it rather than adding a second.
• DKIM. A signing key you enable in your mail provider's admin panel, which hands you a TXT record to publish. In Workspace it is Admin, Apps, Gmail, Authenticate email.
• DMARC. A TXT record at _dmarc.yourdomain.com. Start permissive: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.com.

Check your work at mail-tester.com. Send it one real email from your Mangos AI account and it scores you out of 10 and names what is missing. Aim for 9 or better before you start a campaign.

On a personal Gmail, SPF and DKIM are already handled by Google. You cannot add DMARC to @gmail.com and do not need to.

Warm-up is automatic

A brand new sending account that fires 50 cold emails on day one is the fastest way to get flagged. Mangos AI ramps you up regardless of the cap you set:

Your effective limit is always the lower of the warm-up number and your own daily send cap. There is no way to skip the ramp, which is intentional.

Pacing

Within a send run, emails go out one at a time with a randomized 30 to 90 second gap. A batch of 20 takes roughly 10 to 30 minutes. That is deliberate. Bursts look like a machine, because they are one.

What gets added to every email

Mangos AI appends a footer in code, never through the AI model, so it cannot be paraphrased away or quietly dropped on one draft.

[your signature]
[your physical mailing address]
If you'd rather not hear from me, just reply
"unsubscribe" and I won't email you again.

• The physical address is always attached. Use a real city, state and ZIP. Something vague like "Greater Boston Area" is not compliant and reads as marketing to spam filters. You do not need a registered business or a street number.
• The unsubscribe line can be reworded or hidden per account, but hiding it on cold commercial email is a real legal risk and the app warns you before you do.
• A machine-readable List-Unsubscribe header goes out regardless of that toggle, pointing at your own address. Gmail and Outlook use it to render a native unsubscribe button, and its presence improves inbox placement.

Using your account in campaigns

Setting up SMTP is step one. Here is how it flows through actual sending.

Campaign  ->  Research  ->  Draft  ->  Review  ->  Approve  ->  Send
               (agent)     (agent)     (you)       (you)     (your SMTP)

The agent finds and researches prospects and writes the drafts. Nothing leaves your mailbox without you approving it. That is the whole design of the review pane, not a setting you can flip.

Creating a campaign

A campaign is a goal, an audience and a sequence. There are two sources of prospects:

• Organic. The Outreach researcher finds prospects itself from your product description and audience notes, on a nightly research window.
• CSV list. You import a list you already have, map the columns, and the agent researches and personalizes against each row.

Each campaign is pinned to one sending account. If you have several mailboxes connected, pick the one whose identity matches the campaign, and do not mix a personal address into a company campaign.

Sequences and follow-ups

A campaign has a sequence of steps, each with a wait in days and a hint about what that email should do. Step one is the first touch and later steps are follow-ups.

Follow-ups are sent as real replies. Mangos AI stores the Message-ID of the original and sets In-Reply-To and References on the follow-up, prefixing the subject with Re:. The result threads properly in the recipient's client instead of arriving as a disconnected second email, which is both better for the reader and better for deliverability.

A typical three-step shape:

1. Day 0, the actual pitch, personalized to something specific about them
2. Day 3 to 4, a short nudge with one new angle
3. Day 7 to 10, a one-line close that is easy to ignore

Approving and sending

In the review pane you can edit any draft in place, and your edit is what actually goes out. The body is re-read at send time, so a last-second change is never lost.

• Approve means "I have signed off". It does not send. It is the only status bulk send acts on.
• Send approved drains the approved queue through your SMTP account, paced as described above.
• Schedule stamps a send time on an approved draft and it fires on its own. Scheduled sends survive an app restart.

Your edits also teach the agent. Editing a draft before approving is the strongest style signal you can give it, and later drafts drift toward how you actually write.

Safety checks at the moment of send

Even after approval, every email is re-checked immediately before it goes out:

• Is this address on the suppression list? If so, cancelled.
• Has another campaign already emailed this person? If so, cancelled, unless that campaign explicitly allows re-contact and the cooldown has passed.
• Is there room under today's cap? If not, it is held rather than dropped.

This closes the gap between when you approved something and when it actually sends, which on a scheduled campaign can be days.

A sane first week

1. Connect and test

   Get the account connected and pass Test connection.

2. Prove your authentication

   Send yourself one email, and one to mail-tester.com. Fix SPF, DKIM and DMARC until you score 9 or better. Do this before you write a single line of copy.

3. Set your real cap

   Set the daily cap to what you eventually want, where 50 is a reasonable ceiling per mailbox. The ramp holds you to 10 a day at first regardless.

4. Run one small campaign

   Ten to twenty prospects. Read every draft and edit heavily. This is where the agent learns your voice.

5. Watch replies before scaling

   A reply rate under one percent usually means the targeting is wrong, not the copy. Fix the audience before you increase the volume.

6. Let the ramp lift

   After two to three weeks you are at your full cap with a warm sending history behind you.

Quick reference