Set your sender, reply-to and preview text

Find the setup rows on a draft

Open Campaigns, pick a campaign that is still a draft, and stay on the Campaign Details tab. Down the left of the screen sits a short stack of rows: Recipient List, From, Reply To, Subject, Preview text, and a quieter line naming the subscription the campaign goes out under.

Every row works the same way. Click anywhere on the row to open its editor, make the change, then press the check to save or the x to cancel. A green tick on the left means the row is finished; an orange exclamation mark means the campaign cannot send until you deal with it. Once a campaign is scheduled or sent the rows turn read-only and a padlock explains why: "Only draft campaigns can be edited."

The Subject row belongs to this stack too. Click it and a text box opens with a live counter underneath, which reads "Subjects under 60 characters show fully in most inboxes" and switches to a warning past 60. The wand next to it is Suggest subject lines, and the button that inserts a personalization token sits beside it. If you use a token, the saved subject grows a small "?" that spells out what each recipient will actually see, including the fallback word for anyone missing that field. Subject writing has its own guide: see write emails faster with AI.

Open your draft campaigns in Mailsoftly

Set who the email comes from

Click the From row. The picker lists the people you can send as. When your domain is authenticated, those are the verified senders on it, and the row shows the name and address exactly as a recipient will read them. If your account also has a connected Gmail or Microsoft mailbox, the picker splits into two labelled groups, Your verified domain first and Your connected mailbox second, because a verified domain is the better default once you have one: the whole team can use it, and it carries your full sending allowance.

The star at the end of the picker sets that sender as your personal default, so new campaigns start there without you choosing again.

The address is only half of what a recipient reads. The name in front of it is the other half, and the small card icon in the row opens Edit display name, with First name and Last name fields. Change them here and the note under the fields tells you the consequence: "This name is firm-wide – it updates everywhere this person is used as a sender. The email address stays the same." So this is the place to turn "S Mitchell" into "Sarah at Brightline", and it will read that way on every future campaign from that person.

Choose where replies land

Click the Reply To row. The menu holds the people on your account who can take replies, each shown as a name and address, and below them a group called Reply-to addresses holding any outside mailboxes you have added. Pick one, save, and every reply to this campaign goes there instead of to the sender.

Two things are worth knowing. The card icon appears in this row too, so you can fix a teammate’s display name without leaving the campaign. And when a campaign is sending through a connected Gmail or Microsoft mailbox, this row is locked to that mailbox address and shows a padlock, because the provider sends from your own account and the reply address comes with it.

Use an outside inbox for replies

Some of the best reply addresses belong to people who do not have a Mailsoftly login: a volunteer coordinator, a client care mailbox, someone behind a shared account. Go to Settings, open the Senders tab, and scroll to Reply-to addresses. Type the address, press Add address, and Mailsoftly emails that inbox a confirmation with a single link.

Until its owner clicks that link the address carries a Pending verification badge, and that is the part worth understanding. You can select a pending address on a campaign and keep drafting, but the campaign will not go out: the Reply To row shows a small clock beside the address, and the Review and Send button turns grey with a tooltip counting the fields still to complete. Nothing is sent to the wrong place, because nothing is sent at all. The moment the owner clicks the link the badge flips to Verified and the campaign is free to send.

Resend confirmation sends the email again if it went missing, though it waits about a minute between attempts. Removing an address releases it, and any unsent draft pointing at it quietly falls back to your default reply-to rather than being left with an address that cannot pass the check.

Write the preview text

Preview text, sometimes called the preheader, is the short line an inbox prints next to your subject. Click the Preview text row and the hint under the box gives you the product’s own advice: it appears next to the subject in the inbox, a good one teases what is inside, and 40 to 100 characters works best. The field stops accepting text at 180 characters, which is well past what any inbox will show.

Now the part people miss. This row is never required and never blocks a send, so leaving it empty does not raise a warning. What it does instead is show an "Auto" chip followed by the first readable text of your email, greyed out, because that is exactly what an inbox will fall back to when you send nothing. Open the Review before sending window and you will see the same thing: the mock inbox row prints your subject and then that first body line right after it. Your public email archive card does the same. So a blank preview text is not neutral, it publishes whatever your email happens to open with, which is often a logo caption, a "View in browser" link or a bare greeting.

Treat the greyed line as a preview, not a saved value. If you like what it says, fine. If you do not, type something better.

Check the subscription this campaign sends under

Under the rows sits a quiet line reading "Sending to subscribers of", then a name, then a short note in brackets saying where that came from: from your selected list, account default, or selected manually. Hover it and the tooltip states the rule: "Recipients who unsubscribed from this subscription are skipped automatically."

That is the link between a campaign and your preference center. Contacts choose which of your subscriptions they want, and at send time anyone who opted out of this particular one is filtered out, while everyone else on the list still receives it. Someone who unsubscribed from everything, or whose address has bounced or complained, is excluded whatever subscription you choose.

Press change if the line names the wrong one. Mailsoftly usually gets it right on its own, deriving it from the list you picked and falling back to your account default, and the bracketed note tells you which of those happened. If the line does not appear at all, your account only has one subscription, so there is nothing to choose. Setting up more of them, and what your contacts see, is covered in design your preference center.

With the sender named, the replies routed, the preview line written and the subscription confirmed, everything a recipient meets before they open the email is deliberate rather than accidental.