Choose how you send
The first screen after you sign up asks how you want to send. Here is what each option commits you to, and how to change your mind later.
The moment your account exists, Mailsoftly asks you one question: How do you want to send your first test email? It is the first screen you see, before the dashboard, and it is the only decision that shapes everything after it. Every other setting can wait.
The question is not busywork. Email either arrives or it does not, and what decides that is which address your mail leaves from. This guide walks through each way out of that screen, what it actually commits you to, and how to come back and change your mind. It takes about six minutes to read and about two to act on.
Read the screen and the ways out of it
The screen opens with a green Account created chip, the welcome line, and the question itself. Under it sit the ways forward, and they are deliberately not equal in weight.
The big card at the top is the recommended one: Connect Gmail or Google Workspace, carrying a Recommended badge and two promises, that recipients see your real address rather than ours, and that your inbox odds are far better than any shared domain. Its button reads Connect Google account. If your account also has the Microsoft lane open, a small Google and Microsoft switch appears above the card and swaps it for Connect Outlook or Microsoft 365, with the same badge and the same weight. Whichever one you press goes straight to that provider’s own sign in screen, not to a Mailsoftly settings page.
Below a divider reading "or send a preview without connecting" is the secondary card, Start without connecting, badged Fallback. That is the sandbox, and step 4 covers it honestly. Below that, in small type, is the footnote Already have your own sending domain? with the link Send from it for reliable inbox delivery. And in two places, the X in the top right and a row at the very bottom, is Skip for now.
Simply opening this screen counts. From the first time you see it, your dashboard stops sending you here automatically and lets you get on with things. The screen itself does not disappear, and step 5 shows how to find it again.
Connect a mailbox, then confirm the test
This is the path the screen is built around, and it is the fastest one to a real result. Press Connect Google account or Connect Microsoft account, sign in at the provider, and approve what is asked. On the Google screen there are two boxes to tick, one that lets Mailsoftly send from your account and one that keeps the connection from expiring, and Mailsoftly refuses a connection missing the first rather than leaving you with one that quietly fails.
When you come back, you land on Send a test to your inbox. A chip at the top confirms you are connected and names the address. Then comes the whole email, not a summary of it: a From row and a To row both showing your own connected address, the To row also tagged "that is you", both wearing a padlock captioned Fixed for this test, the subject line, and underneath, the exact rendered email your recipients would receive. Hovering the preview reveals Edit the design if you want to change it first.
The button in the pinned footer reads Send test to my inbox. Beside it, a line tells you how many test sends you have left today, and the allowance resets the next day. That is the whole step. There is nothing to fill in, because the sender and the recipient are both you, on purpose.
The test really does send, and it creates a contact for your own address in your general contacts so the send has somewhere to go. That contact is real and will show up in your audience. Delete it later if you would rather keep your list clean.
Check your inbox
Pressing send lands you on the payoff screen: Sent. Go check your inbox. Beside it is a small mock inbox with your test sitting at the top, from Mailsoftly (you), timestamped now.
Then go and actually open your inbox, because the screen deliberately does not claim your email arrived in the right place. It says so in its own words: no send is ever guaranteed, and placement also depends on your content and who you send to. Look in spam too. Finding it there on your very first send is useful information, not a failure, and it is exactly the sort of thing you want to learn on a test rather than on a real campaign.
From here the screen offers three directions: Build my brand kit, which pulls your logo and colors from your website and is the natural next move; Import contacts and send for real; or Or explore your dashboard if you would rather look around first.
If the test does not arrive at all, do not resend it repeatedly. Come back to this guide’s next steps and check the connection first. Repeated tests only spend today’s allowance.
The sandbox, and what it will not do
Pressing Continue without connecting does not send anything yet. It opens a warning screen first, and the warning is worth reading slowly, because misunderstanding it is the single most common way people conclude that Mailsoftly is broken when it is doing exactly what it said.
The screen is titled Sending without a connected account, subtitled "Honest heads up, so the result does not surprise you", and it sets two paths side by side. On the left, Shared domain: May land in spam, "Shared reputation, not yours." On the right, Connect Gmail: Best shot at the inbox, "Your address, your reputation." The body paragraph names the shared domain your account would send through and explains that Mailsoftly reviews the mail before it leaves, but it is still more likely to land in spam, so it is not a real test of whether you reach the inbox.
Here is what that means in practice. In the sandbox you can do everything except the one thing. Build campaigns, import contacts, design emails, build forms, landing pages and automations, and preview all of it. Test sends still work, but they go to a person on our team for a quick review first, usually within a few hours, rather than leaving immediately. And a real campaign will not go out from the shared address at all: on the campaign screen the Send Now button is replaced by the doors out, Connect Google Workspace, Connect your Microsoft account and Authenticate your domain, and scheduling refuses with the same message. That is not a bug and it is not a hidden plan limit. It is the shared address protecting everyone who uses it.
Choosing Continue without connecting remembers the choice and drops you straight into creating a campaign, with the create picker already open. You can build the whole thing. You just cannot send it until you have your own way out, which is either of the two lanes in step 5.
Nothing you build in the sandbox is wasted. Campaigns, lists, templates and automations all survive the switch. Connecting a mailbox or verifying a domain changes only which address your mail leaves from.
Your own domain, skipping, and finding this screen again
The footnote at the bottom, Send from it for reliable inbox delivery, is the third real lane: your own authenticated domain. It is the right answer when the whole team needs to send as the same address, when your campaigns are larger than a connected mailbox allows, or when you want A/B testing and gradual sending. It costs you a handful of DNS records. Sending from your own domain is available on paid plans, and if your account is not on one yet, this link takes you to the plans rather than to the DNS wizard, so nothing happens by surprise. The full walkthrough is in authenticate your sending domain.
Skip for now does what it says. Your dashboard opens, nothing is chosen, and nothing is broken. Your account simply sits in the same position as the sandbox: everything works except sending a campaign.
Coming back is the part worth knowing, because nothing shouts at you afterwards. On your dashboard, a card reading Get set up in 3 quick steps, we do the heavy lifting holds the first step, Send your first test email, which takes you back into this flow. On every other screen a slim blue strip asks Ready to see it land? and links straight to the test send from your connected account. That tracker retires itself the moment you send your first real campaign, so it will not follow you around forever. And /get-started still works directly for as long as you have not picked a lane; once you have, it quietly takes you to your dashboard instead, which is the app telling you the decision is already made.
Whichever lane you take, the goal of this screen is the same: get one real email from your real address into a real inbox before you ask anything bigger of the product. Once you have done that, connect your mailbox properly or verify your domain, and then go look around the rest of Mailsoftly.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
