Sending vs. connecting a provider
This article covers the send flow itself. If you haven't connected a mailbox yet, or need to fix a broken connection, see Email Setup first — that page covers choosing a provider (Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid, Mailgun, AWS SES, or Custom SMTP) and authorizing it. Once a provider is connected, this page is about what happens when you actually click send.
Sending from the Email tab
On the Distribute hub, the Email tab splits recipients into a Pending list and a Sent list. From Pending, select a subset of receipts or everyone in the list, choose an email template and a connected sending provider, and send. Before sending you can click through recipients one at a time in a preview pane and see the exact message each donor will receive with their merge fields already filled in, so you catch a formatting problem before it reaches a donor's inbox rather than after.
Delivery status: pending to sent
Every receipt in the batch tracks its own delivery state. Sending moves a receipt from Pending email to Email sent once the message is handed off to your mail server — that hand-off is the end state; it doesn't mean the donor has opened it. After a send finishes, a banner confirms how many went out and, if some recipients in the batch still need a physical copy, offers a one-click jump to the Mail tab. See Delivery Status & Resending Emails for the full status table, bounce handling, and open tracking.
Resending
From the Sent list, select recipients and resend — donors get a completely new copy of the email with the current template and data, not a re-delivery of the original message. Each resend is tracked as its own batch linked back to the original send. See Delivery Status & Resending Emails for details.
Sends run as background jobs
Sending doesn't block the page — it runs as a tracked background job, so a large batch keeps processing even if you navigate away. You can monitor active and past email sends from the Jobs page alongside PDF generation and other background work. Large sends are also paced automatically against your provider's daily sending limit; see Daily-Batched Email Sending for how that scheduling works.
Sending in a test run
If the run is a test run, every outbound email is redirected to your own address instead of the donor's, and capped at 10 messages regardless of how many recipients you select — so you can verify the template and merge fields render correctly without risking a real donor receiving a sample. The Email tab shows an inline confirmation before sending in test mode so this redirect isn't a surprise. No credits are consumed either way, since test runs never bill for generation or delivery.
Related
- The Distribute Hub — where the Email tab lives alongside Mail, Skipped, and All receipts
- Email Setup — connect and troubleshoot the provider you're sending from
- Delivery Status & Resending Emails — status meanings, bounces, and resending in depth
- Daily-Batched Email Sending — how large sends are paced automatically