In this article, you will learn how your bulk emails are processed and sent with Yet Another Mail Merge.

How are your bulk emails being sent out with YAMM?

By way of the permissions you granted for Yet Another Mail Merge during installation, YAMM uses Gmail API to access your Gmail mailbox and send the emails from there, on your behalf. To achieve this, YAMM performs the following steps:

1. YAMM sends an instruction to 'send multiple emails' to Gmail

Just like the steps you would follow to send your emails in Gmail, Google provides a solution to automate the process programmatically, using Gmail API. And that’s precisely what YAMM is doing: We simply automate a series of actions that otherwise would have been done manually.

With your grant of the specific permission to 'Send email as you', YAMM only uses your Google account to send a specific instruction to Gmail (i.e.: 'Send multiple emails'). Technically, it's as if you were the one sending this request.

In other words, YAMM only fetches data from your Google Sheet and transfers it to Gmail / Google servers for sending those emails.

Scheduling mail merge:
For the premium users who schedule batch delivery or send emails later, YAMM awaits sending the instruction to Gmail until the scheduled time. YAMM neither prepares the mail merges in advance nor stores them anywhere before the specified time. YAMM opens your spreadsheet & Gmail draft only at the scheduled time. That is why if you delete your email draft/mailing list spreadsheet we will not be able to process your scheduled campaign.

2. Gmail gets the instruction and sends your emails

After getting our YAMM instruction, Gmail will send an email with your Google account to all recipients from your Google Sheet, as if you were sending them manually from Gmail interface.

So the fact that YAMM lets you send mail merges doesn't mean that we are sending emails for you. Gmail is still the one that sends and delivers your emails in bulk. 

Which technology do we use to send your mail merge?

Yet Another Mail Merge relies entirely on Google Apps Script technology. By using Google Apps Script, all the YAMM code is based and executed in Google servers. All your data is stored and processed in the Google Cloud.

Contrary to many other ESPs like MailChimp, we don't have any email servers ourselves. Instead, we rely on the Gmail API to send emails.

So when you use YAMM, all instructions and executions of each action are done through Google servers, and not with any other external services.

Those actions include:

• Accessing data from your spreadsheet
• Importing recipient list from Google Contacts
• Preparing mail merge emails
• Sending your mail merge

All your emails are sent from your own Google account to your recipients, and only via Google servers.

What happens to my data and my emails after a mail merge completes?

Once Gmail finished sending your emails to your contact list, all your emails are stored only in your Gmail box. Those emails are labelled with your subject line, using Gmail labels. At no point in time does YAMM store any copies of your emails or its contents.

Unlike other ESP like MailChimp, YAMM never stores your recipients' email addresses in any external database. All your recipients' email addresses always stay in your Google Sheets, and YAMM only accesses it while performing the mail merge.