Getting started: from signup to your first send

Getting from a fresh SEMAOS account to your first sent email takes four steps: finish onboarding, connect your Gmail or Outlook mailbox, import your contacts, and send. Most people finish in about 15 minutes. This article walks through each step and explains the choices you'll hit along the way.

Which signup option should I pick?

The register page has two buttons, and the difference matters.

Start free asks for no credit card. You get 1 seat, 2 active sequences, and sending through your own connected mailbox (Gmail or Outlook), capped at 250 to 1,000 emails a day depending on the kind of account. The free plan has no platform sending, so broadcasts and custom sending domains aren't available on it.

Start 30-day trial collects a card through Stripe but charges nothing during the trial. Every feature is unlocked for 30 days (8 seats, unlimited active sequences, and your own custom sending domain), with 1,000 SEMAOS platform sends for the whole trial (not per month). Sends through your own connected mailbox don't count toward that allowance; they're capped at 250 to 1,000 per mailbox per day instead, depending on the kind of account, and you can connect up to three mailboxes.

If you mainly send 1:1 outreach and sequences, the free plan is a real working setup rather than a demo, because your mail goes through your own mailbox either way. Pick the trial when you want to evaluate broadcasts, teammates, or higher volume.

What does onboarding ask for, and why?

Onboarding asks for two things, and you can't send until both are filled in.

The first is your company name, which appears in your account and becomes the default sender identity for your team.

The second is a physical mailing address, which gets printed in the footer of every email you send. This one isn't optional. The CAN-SPAM Act requires a valid postal address in commercial email, and SEMAOS refuses to send any message without one. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide says the address can be a current street address, a post office box registered with the US Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency. A virtual office registered as a commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) works.

How do I connect my mailbox?

Go to Settings → Mailbox and pick Google or Microsoft. You'll go through the provider's standard OAuth consent screen. SEMAOS never sees your password, and you can revoke access from your Google or Microsoft account at any time.

Once connected, your 1:1 emails and sequence emails send from your own address, through your own mailbox, and replies land in your regular inbox. SEMAOS caps each mailbox by the kind of account (250 a day for a personal Outlook account, 400 for a personal Gmail account, and 1,000 for a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account) and pauses then resumes the next day when you reach it. Free includes one mailbox per user; paid plans and trials allow three. The mailbox guide covers the cap, adding more mailboxes, reply detection, tracking defaults, and reconnecting.

How do I import contacts?

Open Contacts and click Import from CSV. The wizard maps your file's columns to contact fields and auto-detects the common headers (email, first name, last name, company, title, phone).

Three things are worth knowing before you upload. When an email address in your file already exists as a contact, you choose what happens: skip the row, overwrite the contact, or merge fields. Files up to 50 MB, around 150,000 rows, import through an async pipeline, and you can leave the page while it runs. Rows that fail validation don't block the rest of the import; you get a downloadable error CSV listing exactly which rows failed and why.

What should my first send be?

You have three options, from smallest to largest.

A one-off email from any contact's page is the quickest way to test, and sending one to yourself is a reasonable first move.

A sequence is a multi-step outreach flow with delays and conditions. Start with two or three steps. The first step must be an email.

A broadcast sends one email to a whole list at once. Broadcasts go through the SEMAOS platform channel, so they need a paid plan or trial.

A good first exercise: import a small test list that includes a second address you control, such as a personal one, then enroll it in a two-step sequence with a wait of at least an hour between the two emails. Answer the first email from that second address before the second one goes out. The engagement data shows up as it accrues.

On a connected Outlook mailbox, the reply stops the sequence for that contact, and SEMAOS picks it up within about 15 minutes. A reply from the Outlook address you send with doesn't count, because SEMAOS skips mail from the mailbox's own address. Sequence emails sent through SEMAOS's sending domain or your own verified domain are checked too, when the reply detection switch under Settings → Sending is on. SEMAOS then forwards the reply to the inbox Settings → Sending names, if it comes from the contact's own address and is 10 MB or smaller, which leaves room for about 7 MB of attachments. It forwards at most three replies per enrollment (each time a contact is enrolled in a sequence). A reply from anyone else, a colleague of the contact for example, still stops the sequence but isn't forwarded. Neither is a larger message, a fourth reply, a reply the virus scan flags, or one that fails the DMARC check for the contact's domain. In each of those cases the same inbox gets a short email naming the sender and the reason, without the message itself. You get at most one of these per reason for each enrollment. Sequence emails sent from a connected Gmail mailbox aren't checked for replies yet.

What happens after I send?

Opens and clicks show up on each contact and in the analytics dashboard. Every contact gets an engagement score from 0 to 100, recalculated nightly, which you can sort and filter by.

One caveat is worth learning early: open rates are approximate in both directions. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates them, because it downloads an email's images in the background when the message arrives rather than when it is read, and clients that block images undercount them. Clicks and replies are the signals to trust.

What do I see when I log in?

Logging in takes you to your dashboard. It's built to answer "what needs my attention today," so it leads with decisions rather than with a report.

There are four parts to it.

Alerts show up only when something needs you. There are three: your connected mailbox has used 80% or more of its daily send budget, you have contacts loaded but no sequence currently running, or you're still sending on the shared platform domain rather than one of your own. When none of those apply, the band isn't there at all.

The setup checklist tracks the five steps from connecting a mailbox to launching your first sequence. It disappears for good once you finish all five.

Last 7 days shows sent, delivered, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate, each compared against the 7 days before. Use the "View analytics" link for longer ranges, per-sequence funnels, and broadcast breakdowns.

Active sequences lists what is sending right now, with the number of contacts still active, completed, and replied for each.

A few warnings deliberately follow you onto every page instead of living only here: an account that's paused, a mailbox connection that needs reconnecting, and a bounce rate high enough to throttle your sending. Those stop mail from going out, so you see them wherever you happen to be working. A read-only account shows its notice here and on the billing page, and every button it blocks says why in a short line under it. Where several blocked buttons sit together, like a row of actions or the plan cards, the reason is shown once below the group. In lists, where it would repeat on every row, you see it when you hover the button. Screen readers read the reason for each button either way.

How do I add a profile photo?

Open Settings → Profile and choose Upload photo. Pick a PNG, JPEG or WebP image up to 20 MB. Your browser keeps the center square of it (a zoom slider lets you crop tighter), shrinks it to 256 × 256 pixels and saves it well under our 512 KB limit, so a large phone photo is fine to pick. The photo then appears on your account button and at the top of your settings. Until you add one, and whenever a photo fails to load, you see your initials instead.

You get 10 uploads a day, and the count resets at midnight UTC. If an upload fails, pressing Save photo again reuses it and usually doesn't count. It does count if you changed the photo or the zoom (or closed the crop) first, or if more than 15 minutes have passed since that upload started.

Remove photo takes yours down and deletes the file, and changing your photo deletes the old one. A copy of the old image can stay cached for a little while after that. If your account is on hold you can still remove your photo but not upload a new one. Photos are served from the same public address as the images in your emails, so anyone with the link can open one.

Removing a teammate from your team deletes their photo too. It stops loading from our servers straight away, though a browser that already showed it may keep its own copy for a while. If it is still showing later on, email support@semaos.io and we'll take it down.

Why does SEMAOS ask me to refresh?

We ship updates often, and a tab you left open keeps running the version it loaded. When a newer one is live, a small note appears near your account button (at the bottom of the screen on a phone): "A new version of SEMAOS is ready." Refresh reloads the page and picks up the changes; Later hides the note until the next update. Sequences, templates, broadcasts and one-off emails you are writing ask before leaving, as do your profile and signature. Anything else typed on the page, such as a new contact or an import you're partway through, isn't kept, so finish it first. The check runs every few minutes and whenever you come back to the tab.

From here, the deeper guides cover each area: connecting your mailbox, sending channels, importing contacts, building sequences, broadcasts, A/B testing, engagement scores, deliverability, custom sending domains, plans and limits, and unsubscribes and compliance.