Connecting an inbox
All three providers are set up from the same connect panel on the Inboxes page — pick a provider, then follow that provider's flow.
On this page
Business email only
Every connection path — Google OAuth, Microsoft OAuth, and manual SMTP — runs the same personal-domain check before the inbox is saved. Gmail, Googlemail, Outlook.com, Hotmail (and its regional variants), Live, MSN, Yahoo (and its regional variants/aliases), iCloud, Mac.com, AOL, ProtonMail, GMX, and Mail.com are all blocked, along with a few others on the same list.
Trying to connect a blocked domain fails with: "Please use a business email address — ForgeSend is built for sending from a domain you control, which protects your deliverability and keeps your outreach looking credible. Connect a Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or custom domain inbox instead."
Zoho Mail is deliberately not on the blocked list — it's offered as a supported SMTP preset below, not treated as a personal-email domain. The block list targets consumer webmail, not every third-party host.
Choosing a provider
The connect panel opens on a provider chooser — three stacked cards, not a persistent tab strip. Picking one swaps the chooser for that provider's own form, with a small ‹ Change provider link to come back.
Google Workspace
Connect Gmail or Google Workspace with OAuth.
Microsoft 365 / Outlook
Connect Outlook or Microsoft 365 with OAuth.
SMTP / Manual
Connect using SMTP credentials and optional IMAP reply sync.
Before a provider's picked, the body just reads "Select a provider above to get started."
Google Workspace
Clicking Continue to Google submits a real form post to the backend, which redirects your browser into Google's OAuth consent screen — it isn't a background API call.
Connect Google
Connect the Google account you want ForgeSend to send campaigns from and check replies for. You'll be redirected to Google to sign in.
Continue to GoogleWorkspace admins
Connect your whole team instantly
Mark ForgeSend as a trusted app in Google Admin Console so anyone on the team can connect without an individual consent screen.
Google's own instructions ↗
ForgeSend requests four Google scopes: openid, email, profile, and full mailbox access (https://mail.google.com/) — the broad scope, rather than narrower send/read-only scopes, is what lets ForgeSend's warmup system authenticate over IMAP/SMTP directly, not just through Gmail's REST API. Tokens are encrypted at rest before they're stored.
The admin card's OAuth Client ID is fetched live and meant to be pasted into Admin Console → Security → Access and data control → API controls → Manage Third-Party App Access → Configure new app, then marked Trusted for the chosen org unit. This is the one-time setup that lets every mailbox on the domain connect without each person individually approving ForgeSend's consent screen.
Microsoft 365 / Outlook
Same pattern as Google — Connect with Microsoft is a form post that redirects into Microsoft's identity platform.
Connect Microsoft 365
Connect Outlook through Microsoft identity and Graph permissions. Recommended for M365 users.
Connect with MicrosoftThe Microsoft scopes requested are openid, email, profile, offline_access, User.Read, Mail.Send, and Mail.Read — Microsoft-connected inboxes get the same reply-checking capability as Google ones do.
SMTP / Manual
For any other provider, the SMTP form is a two-step layout.
Step 1 — Choose your email provider
smtp.office365.com · 587Zoho Mail
smtp.zoho.com · 465cPanel / Fasthost
Custom hostOther / Custom
Manual setup
Step 2 — Enter your credentials
From email
Display name
SMTP username
App password
Fetch replies via IMAP
Exactly four presets exist: Outlook / M365 (smtp.office365.com · 587 · STARTTLS), Zoho Mail (smtp.zoho.com · 465 · SSL/TLS), cPanel / Fasthost (blank host, manual entry), and Other / Custom (blank host, manual entry). Gmail and Yahoo presets do not exist — both are personal free-email domains the connection endpoint rejects outright, so a one-click preset for either would just walk you into a guaranteed rejection. Whichever preset you pick, the visible fields are always From email, display name, SMTP username, and app password; only cPanel/Fasthost and Other/Custom expose a raw host/port/security picker for manual entry.
- Test calls the SMTP verification endpoint directly without saving anything — use it to catch bad credentials before committing.
- Save Inbox re-runs that same verification, then saves. It will not save an inbox that fails verification, and shows a confirmation toast — "{email} connected." — on success.
- Checking Fetch replies via IMAP reveals IMAP host, port, security, username, and password fields, stored separately from the SMTP credentials — a mailbox can send via SMTP without configuring reply-fetching at all.
Use port 465 (SSL/TLS) where your provider offers it. Port 587 (STARTTLS) can be blocked outbound on some VPS providers — if 465 isn't available, select STARTTLS explicitly rather than assuming the default will work.
Reconnecting and disconnecting
Both live in the inbox's detail slide-over, not on the card itself. Disconnecting is a soft disable, not a delete:
- Status changes to Disconnected, with
lastErrorset to"Disconnected by user"and the OAuth token expiry cleared — the encrypted access/refresh tokens themselves are left in place, not wiped - Any of that inbox's still-queued (
PENDING) sends are left exactly as they are — they simply wait, since dispatch only ever selectsCONNECTEDinboxes, and pick back up automatically the moment you reconnect - Reply history, past send jobs, the daily-limit record, and (for SMTP) the stored SMTP/IMAP config are all preserved
Disconnect this inbox?
Your message history will be preserved. This inbox will stop sending and checking for replies until you reconnect it.
How you get back to Connected depends on the provider:
- Google / Microsoft — a Reconnect button (amber for a manual disconnect, red for an error state) re-runs the OAuth flow. Because inboxes are keyed on workspace + provider + email, this updates the same row rather than creating a second one.
- SMTP — there's no one-click reconnect button; the slide-over just shows "Reconnect from the SMTP / Manual panel" and points you back to the connect panel to re-enter and re-verify credentials.
Reconnecting an OAuth inbox checks that the Google or Microsoft account you authenticate with actually matches the email address already on file for that inbox. If you try to reconnect with a different account, ForgeSend rejects it with "You selected a different account. Reconnect with {expected} to fix this inbox." rather than silently swapping the inbox to a new mailbox. A genuine reconnect also resets the health-scoring window described in Inbox health and rotation, so old failures from before the reconnect stop counting against it immediately.