The short version
- Outreach sends through your own connected mailbox: Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any SMTP server.
- Replies land in your inbox, in a real thread, where you can answer them like a person.
- Shared platform domains accumulate every customer's sending reputation. Sending as yourself keeps that reputation yours.
- Mailbox credentials are encrypted at rest and decrypted only inside the single call that sends or reads mail.
- Transactional mail from Dice — alerts and reports — goes out separately and is never used for cold outreach.
There are two ways an outreach tool can send your email. It can send it for you, from its own infrastructure, with a reply-to header pointing back at you. Or it can send it as you, through your actual mailbox.
The first is dramatically easier to build. It is also the reason so many outreach tools quietly stop working after a year.
The shared domain problem
When a platform sends on behalf of thousands of customers from its own domain, that domain's sending reputation becomes a shared resource — and reputation is decided by aggregate behaviour, not by yours.
One customer imports a purchased list. Another sends four thousand messages a day to unverified addresses. Spam complaints accumulate against the domain, filters tighten, and every careful sender on the platform inherits the consequences. You did nothing wrong and your reply rate halves.
There is a second, more immediate problem. A pitch arriving from outreach@some-platform.com, asking an editor to update their article, reads exactly like what it is: a bulk message. Recipients respond to it accordingly, before any filter gets involved.
A pitch from a platform address converts badly, and routing cold volume through a shared domain gets it blocked. Both problems disappear when the mail is genuinely yours.
Three ways to connect
Dice supports three mailbox backends, and the rest of the product does not know or care which one you use:
| Provider | How it connects | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | OAuth against your Google account or Workspace | Individuals and teams on Google Workspace |
| Microsoft | OAuth against Microsoft 365 via Graph | Organizations on Microsoft 365 or Outlook |
| SMTP | Host, port, and credentials for any mail server | Custom domains, self-hosted mail, and providers without an OAuth integration |
All three implement the same interface — send a message, read inbound activity — so campaigns, send windows, follow-ups, and reply classification behave identically regardless of backend.
What sending as you actually changes
- 01
Your reputation is yours
Good sending behaviour compounds in your favour instead of being averaged against strangers. It also means the guards on volume and timing protect something you own — which is why they are enforced at send time rather than left as suggestions.
- 02
Replies land in a real thread
The recipient hits reply and it arrives in your inbox, in the thread, with history. You can answer from your phone. Nothing is trapped inside a tool's separate inbox.
- 03
The relationship is portable
The conversation lives in your mailbox. If you stop using the product tomorrow, every thread you built is still there.
- 04
Recipients can check you out
A real address at a real domain can be looked up. That is a large part of why editors answer at all.
Editorial outreach
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A useful addition for your AI tools roundup
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How credentials are handled
Connecting a mailbox means trusting a product with the ability to send as you, which deserves a direct answer about how that trust is held.
- Credentials are encrypted at rest, never stored in plaintext.
- Decryption happens in exactly one place in the codebase — the mail layer — so plaintext secrets exist only inside a single call frame and never travel through the rest of the application.
- OAuth connections use the provider's own consent flow, and can be revoked from your Google or Microsoft account at any time without involving us.
- When a mailbox's authorization stops working, it is marked as needing reauthorization and sending stops rather than silently failing.
The one thing that does not send from your mailbox
Dice's own transactional email — backlink alerts, run completion notices, billing messages — goes out through a separate transactional provider on our domain. That mail is to you, not to your prospects, and keeping the two systems entirely separate means a product notification can never be confused with, or affect, your outreach.
The reverse holds too: that provider is never used for cold outreach, from any account, ever.