Docs

Alpha Mail — User Guide

Alpha Mail turns a goal into a ready-to-send, personalized cold-email campaign — generated, measured, and optimized. This guide walks through the whole loop.

New here? The fastest path: Home → "Start a campaign from a goal" → type what you want → review → launch. Everything below is the detail.

1. One-time setup

Before generating, two things must be set (the wizard walks you through them):

  • Company (Settings → Company) — your country/city, what you offer, and your angle/positioning. This grounds every email in who you actually are.
  • Variables (Settings → Variables) — pick your sending tool's merge-token style (Lemlist, Smartlead, Instantly, Apollo, or custom) so tokens like {{firstName}} render correctly in your sender.

Optional but powerful:

  • Knowledge base (Settings → Knowledge base) — paste real facts: case studies, product details, customer wins, positioning. The AI draws on these so emails are grounded in truth instead of made-up claims.
  • Email senders (Settings → Email senders) — connect Lemlist and/or Smartlead with an API key so finished campaigns push in one click.

2. Generate a campaign

Three ways, fastest first:

  1. Command bar (recommended). On the dashboard, type a goal in plain English — "Book demos with heads of ops at Series-B fintechs in DACH" — hit Draft brief. Alpha Mail turns it into a structured brief (audience, roles, priorities, CTA, language, steps). Review/tweak, then Launch campaign.
  2. Quick Mode. Pick an audience + occasion template for an instant draft.
  3. Custom Mode. Fill in audience, job titles, priorities, and CTA yourself for maximum control.

Generation runs research → grounded writing → merge-field injection. You land on an editable result with every email step.

3. Edit with the co-writing editor

Each email step has:

  • Send-confidence score — a live 0–100 deliverability/quality meter (spam words, length, links, shouting, personalization, readability). Fix what it flags before sending.
  • Inline AI rewrite — hit Edit, then one-tap actions: Shorter, Punchier, Warmer, Fix spam words, Stronger opener, or rewrite the subject.
  • Merge tokens render as pills so you see exactly where personalization lands.

Export to a Google Doc anytime, or copy all.

4. Contacts & personalization

  • Import (Contacts → New list) — upload a CSV, map columns to fields.
  • AI personalize — writes a tailored one-line icebreaker per contact from their data + your company profile. The icebreaker is added to email 1 on push.
  • Enrich — fills missing job title / company / industry via Apollo (connect an Apollo key in Settings → Email senders).
  • Preview emails — see the actual rendered email for every contact (merge fields + icebreaker filled), with flags for missing fields or stray tokens. Catch problems before they go to 500 people.
  • Contact timeline — click any contact's email for a single record: profile, enriched fields, icebreaker, and every reply they've sent across sequences.

5. Push to a sender

On a finished sequence, Push to Lemlist / Smartlead. Optionally pick a contact list to load as leads (capped at 500/push). Each push creates a campaign in your own sender account with the email steps + leads, and records it so we can track performance.

6. Measure performance

The Performance panel on a sequence shows live opens / clicks / replies / bounces per pushed campaign, fetched on demand. Hit Refresh anytime.

Numbers stay at zero until your sender actually starts sending.

7. A/B subject testing + autopilot

  • Generate variants — alternative subject lines to split-test.
  • Push the original and any variant as separate campaigns; compare open rates in Performance.
  • Autopilot — flip it on and Alpha Mail automatically crowns the winning subject by open rate once there's enough volume. No babysitting.

8. Replies inbox (command center)

The Replies tab is a keyboard-first triage center. For each reply, the AI classifies intent (interested / objection / not now / OOO / unsubscribe) and drafts a grounded response.

Shortcuts: J/K move · E compose (opens your mail app) · C copy draft · R redraft · S snooze · H mark handled · U reopen. Filter by status (Open / Snoozed / Handled).

Sync new replies from a sequence's page ("Sync replies").

9. Always-on plays

Plays let outreach run itself: when new contacts land in a watched list, auto-personalize and push them through a chosen sequence. Drop a CSV into the list and the play handles the rest — it never re-sends to the same contact.

10. Text Alpha Mail (iMessage)

Link your phone (Settings → API keys → Text Alpha Mail) and brainstorm + ship by text:

"cold outreach to fintech COOs" → it drafts a campaign → "push it to lemlist with my Q3 list" → "Reply SEND to confirm." → SEND → 🚀

Nothing sends until you reply SEND — generation and reading are free, but the actual push always waits for your explicit confirmation.

For developers

Driving Alpha Mail from an agent, the MCP server, or your own code? See INTEGRATIONS.md.