Connecting Your Email for Lead Follow-Up

Updated October 9, 2026·Following Up·Share on X

Every lead-facing email in Conference Hero sends from your own connected mailbox, not from a shared no-reply address. That means your follow-ups land in the lead's inbox as a normal email from you, replies come back to you, and the sent copy sits in your Sent folder. This article covers connecting your inbox and the pacing that keeps your sends deliverable.

Availability: connecting a personal mailbox is switched on per workspace by the Conference Hero team. Campaign Hero workspaces always have it, since campaigns need a sending channel. If the My Email tab is missing under Integrations, ask your Customer Success contact.

Why sends come from your own mailbox

Leads reply to people, not to platforms. Sending as yourself means:

Your name is on the message, so it reads as a real person reaching out.
Replies land in your own inbox, where you can just answer.
Sent copies live in your mailbox, so your records are complete.

If you have no mailbox connected, you cannot send lead-facing email. The platform never falls back to a generic address for these sends. This applies to individual drafts, AI follow-up campaigns, and queued drafts.

Connecting Gmail or Outlook

Go to Integrations → My Email.
Click connect for Gmail or Outlook.
Approve the permission to send mail on your behalf. Google shows each permission with a checkbox; if the send permission is unticked, Gmail won't connect and the Integrations page tells you why. For Outlook, a work or school account may need your IT admin to approve Conference Hero first; if Microsoft doesn't grant the send permission, the Integrations page says so.

One inbox at a time. You can connect Gmail or Outlook, not both. To switch, disconnect the current inbox first, then connect the other one. Reconnecting the same provider (for example, to change the access level) works any time.

Outlook works with work, school, and personal Microsoft accounts. One exception: a personal Microsoft account that signs in with a non-Microsoft address (for example a Gmail address) has a mailbox with a generated address like outlook_...@outlook.com, and that's the address leads would see. Conference Hero won't connect those accounts. Use a Microsoft 365 work account or an @outlook.com / @hotmail.com address instead. Emails you send through Outlook thread with the earlier steps of a sequence and carry a one-click unsubscribe header, the same as Gmail.

Any role can connect their own inbox. Viewers can connect a mailbox for their profile but still cannot send lead email, in line with their read-only role. Messages are stamped with the provider they were sent through.

Choosing an access level

When you connect, you pick how much access to grant. You can change it later by reconnecting.

Basic - send only. The smallest permission. Conference Hero can send mail from your address and nothing else. No reply or bounce tracking.
Advanced (coming soon) - send plus reply and bounce tracking. For Gmail this reads message headers only (from, subject, date), so the reply inbox shows a short preview rather than the full message. For Outlook this reads full messages.
Full reply reading (Gmail only) - send plus read access to your Gmail so the reply inbox shows the complete reply text and the AI can categorize replies accurately. This is what powers the positive-replies goal on a campaign. It is broader than Advanced, so pick it when reading replies in-app matters more than the tighter permission. Outlook's Advanced already reads full messages, so it has no separate Full option.

Reply and bounce tracking is coming soon. Advanced and Full reply reading are not available yet for Gmail or Outlook, so every inbox connects in Basic (send only) for now. The options show greyed out on the My Email tab until they're ready. Until then, sequences keep sending after a lead replies, so stop the sequence for that lead from the campaign page when you see their reply. Mailboxes that were already connected with Advanced keep working.

The warm-up ramp

A brand-new mailbox that suddenly sends hundreds of emails looks like spam to the provider. To avoid that, each new connection ramps its daily limit over the first ten days, starting around 20 sends a day and climbing to 250, before your plan's cap takes over. The My Email tab shows a warm-up progress card so you know where you are.

Per-user send caps

Rate limits are per person, per connected mailbox, matching how Gmail and Outlook actually enforce limits. This lets a five-person team scale sends linearly instead of sharing one workspace cap. The per-user caps by plan:

Starter - 5 per minute, 100 per day, 2,000 per month.
Growth - 10 per minute, 300 per day, 6,000 per month.
Enterprise - unlimited.

Your effective daily cap during warm-up is the lower of your plan cap and your warm-up cap. The My Email tab shows your current usage against these limits. See plans and billing for the full comparison.

Business hours: when your emails go out

Your business hours live in Profile, under My timezone: pick the times and days you work, in your own timezone. Each teammate sets their own, so a team spread across timezones each keeps their own day.

Tick Only send lead emails during my business hours (in your profile, or on the My Email tab under Business hours) and campaign and queued emails that come due outside them wait for the next slot, so a follow-up you approve at 11pm sends in the morning.

The same hours power Check my Calendar Availability in a lead's Email window. With your personal calendar connected (Integrations → My Calendar), it lists your free time over the next 5 working days, in gaps of 30 minutes or more, as text you can copy into your email, for example "Monday, Oct 12th: 10-11 AM, 1-5 PM CT". It counts both your calendar and your Conference Hero meetings and planner activities.

Campaign Hero workspaces start each new member on 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday hours in their local timezone with the email hold on, so cold outreach never fires at odd hours before you have set your own hours. Adjust or turn it off any time.

Deliverability basics

Let the warm-up run its course on a new mailbox.
Keep your business hours realistic so pacing looks human.
Personalize follow-ups (the AI generator does this per lead) rather than blasting identical copy.
Campaign sends are staggered and jittered per sender, so they avoid the machine-gun fingerprint spam filters watch for.