FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Q - How does SmartMailerAI work?

SmartMailerAI can be thought of as "mail-merge plus AI." It works by first taking an original Draft Template email, or "Draft", and fills in the tags in that template with the relevant recipient information for each row in your spreadsheet. It also scrapes each recipient website for relevant plain text information and incorporates that with the information you gave it about yourself ("My Intelligence") and feeds that, along with a prompt into a "Large Language Model" AI like ChatGPT to re-write the template email and produce individualized emails to each recipient. You can then send out all of these emails to your recipients at once. Additionally, you can use SmartMailerAI in different presets or "modes." These modes will determine how the AI is instructed to write your emails. For example Employment-seeking, Recruiting, Advertising, Campaigning, Customer Outreach, Event Invitation, Wedding Invitation, or Custom.

Q - I have a large spreadsheet with hundreds of contacts in it. Will SmartMailerAI be able to handle that?

Yes! This is actually the ideal way to use SmartMailerAI. It excels in situations where there are too many recipients to be able to write personalized emails. For example during a job search in an extremely crowded and competitive job market where you may be considering many hundreds of jobs. There are some limitations however. When performing a processing step, (like scraping, generating emails or sending emails) SmartMailerAI will be limited to 30 seconds of processing time. SmartMailerAI was designed to be very fast, but if SmartMailerAI reaches this time limit it will stop and record whatever results it was able to complete into your spreadsheet, leaving the remaining rows blank. Simply running the process again (either scraping, generating, or mailing) will pick up where it left off on the next blank row. This is a common pattern for how SmartMailerAI works, generally blank rows will get filled in, while rows that already contain something will be skipped. For example, during the email sending process, if the EMAIL SENT cell is not empty (ie: it contains a date) then an email for that row will not be sent.

Q - Can I include attachments in my emails?

Yes, in order to include attachments in your emails you will need to attach them to the Draft Template email. So for example if you're using the Employment-seeking mode, you may want to attach your Resume or CV to the Draft Template email and it will be attached to all of the emails that get sent out.

Q - Do I have to send whatever the AI generates?

No, you can edit the emails before you send them. This is the main reason why SmartMailerAI puts the generated emails into your spreadsheet. This gives you a chance to review them and edit them if they contain something you don't like. If all of the generated emails look undesirable for some reason, you can clear the GENERATED EMAILS column and start over. In this situation you would probably want to edit the original Draft template to guide the AI toward the content you would prefer. Also, review the System Persona and AI Prompt on the AI page and make any edits you would like the AI to consider. You can tell the AI to do anything you want, think of it like instructions to a secretary re-writing your emails for you.

Q - Do I have to scrape websites?

No, you can instead enter the RECIPIENT INTELLIGENCE manually yourself if you already have the information available. Scraping is simply a convenience functionality to speed up the intelligence gathering process. You do not have to use the scraping feature, but you MUST make sure your RECIPIENT INTELLIGENCE column is filled in with relevant information. For example if you're using SmartMailerAI in employment-seeking mode you would want to make sure that it contains the job description, or possibly text about the department that you are interested in. As another example if you are using SmartMailerAI in recruiting mode you might want to have experience or qualification information about the candidate.

Q - Do I need an OpenAI account to use SmartMailerAI?

Yes, currently SmartMailerAI uses OpenAI as the main AI provider platform. SmartMailerAI connects to your OpenAI account via what's called a "key." This key can be used to make queries to OpenAI on your behalf, and those queries cost you money based on how large they are. So keep this key secret and do not share it with anyone else that you do not trust. In SmartMailerAI to create a key follow the instructions after clicking the "Set Up Key" button on the Setup tab. This key stays inside your google account and SmartMailerAI does not store it anywhere else, it is treated as sensitive data. If someone does get access to your key without your knowledge you can delete it through the OpenAI dashboard and create a new one.

Q - Is OpenAI's ChatGPT expensive?

Cost depends on the model used. We currently recommend using the gpt-4-turbo model for ChatGPT since this is the best quality for the price. At the time of this writing this model costs about $20 usd per 1 Million tokens. Tokens are basically words, so essentially $20 for 1 Million words. You can expect to hit that limit after generating roughly 200-300 emails with SmartMailerAI. This very much depends on how much text you generate so your mileage may vary. The cheapest option is gpt-3.5-turbo, but you also sacrifice quality. The emails that gpt 3.5 generates will not be as good. Every time you generate emails with AI you will cost yourself money through OpenAI. OpenAI's billing model is pay-as-you-go, so if you do not generate any emails, you will not spend any money. The more emails you generate, the more cost you will accumulate.

Q - Can I use SmartMailerAI without the AI? For example just as regular mail-merge?

That's not really the intended use of SmartMailerAI. SmartMailerAI will send whatever is in the GENERATED EMAIL column, so in theory you could put anything you like there, but that defeats the purpose of mail-merge. The AI generation step uses the mail-merge results in order to write a personalized email to that recipient, so the AI is an integral part of the process. If you are wanting to customize emails in different ways, keep in mind you have several options: the Draft Template email, the CUSTOM DRAFT column, the AI System Persona, and the AI Prompt. You have complete control over the contents of these things. The CUSTOM DRAFT column can be used as a "replacement draft" You can tell the AI to be more friendly, or to give more detailed examples, or to focus on a particular topic, whatever you think your style is. This is called "Prompt Engineering." You're encouraged to play around with different drafts and prompts to see what works best for you.

Q - Can I preview the emails that will be sent?

Yes, on the Send tab, click the "Send Test to Myself" button. This will send the first 3 emails in your spreadsheet to your personal inbox without sending them to anyone else. You can review what the emails look like there.

Q - How many emails can I send at once?

SmartMailerAI will use the sending limits of your Gmail account or Google Workspaces account. So it depends on your Google account. If you are using Gmail, you will have about 100 daily emails you can send. For a Google Workspaces account you will have about 2000 daily emails that you can send. SmartMailerAI does not impose any quotas or sending limits. If you hit the send limit, SmartMailerAI will simply stop and record how far it got so that you can come back the next day and continue sending where it left off. This is recorded in the EMAIL SENT column as a date whenever the email was sent out.

Q - Can I send anonymized emails?

No, SmartMailerAI is designed to send emails "as you." So for example if your email is bob@gmail.com, then the recipient will get an email from bob@gmail.com. There is currently no functionality to send emails as another address, like "marketing@domain.com" for example.

Q - I'm having trouble. How do I get help?

Email support@schulkinstech.com with a brief description of the problem and your email address that you use SmartMailerAI with.

Q - There is sensitive information in my resume and Google drive contents are accessed by SmartMailerAI. Are my personal details safe?

Yes, SmartMailerAI is designed to keep all of your personal data attached to your google account and not elsewhere. We only request read-only access to your google drive in order to facilitate reading your spreadsheets entirely from within Gmail without forcing you to open Google Sheets. Be aware, however, that when you click Generate emails, the filled-in draft email and AI prompt will get sent to OpenAI to feed into ChatGPT. This data will include whatever personal information you have entered under the "MY INTELLIGENCE" portion of the interface. Generally this should be safe and secure, since this is using encrypted https transmission and the data should be handled in a secure way on OpenAI's end, but we do not control how that data is handled on OpenAI's side. Just be aware that this is how it works. We defer to OpenAI's privacy policy for more information. You can also review SmartMailerAI's privacy policy here: Privacy Policy

Q - Are there any future plans to support other LLMs like Google's Gemini?

Yes!