Email Integration

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Why Connect Your Email?

Before you can send outreach emails through Recruitier, you need to connect your email account. This is not about Recruitier sending emails on your behalf through some generic relay. When you connect Gmail or Outlook, every email Recruitier sends goes out from your actual inbox, using your real email address, your name, and your email signature. Recipients see a normal email from you, and their replies land directly in your inbox. This matters for recruitment because trust is everything. Prospects and hiring managers need to see a real person behind the message, not a faceless automation tool. Your connected email account is the bridge between Recruitier’s outreach tools and authentic, professional communication.

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Supported Email Providers

Recruitier supports the two most widely used professional email platforms.

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Setting Up Your Email Connection

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What Permissions Does Recruitier Need?

When you connect your email, Recruitier requests a specific set of permissions. Here is what each one does and why it is needed.

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Gmail Permissions

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Outlook Permissions

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How Email Sending Works

When you compose and send an outreach email in Recruitier, here is what happens behind the scenes:

1. You compose the message in Recruitier’s message composer, selecting the recipient, subject line, and body content (optionally using AI-assisted generation).
2. Your cached email signature is automatically appended to the message body, separated by a line break. Redundant closings like “Best regards” or “Met vriendelijke groet” are removed from the signature to avoid duplication with the AI-generated message.
3. Recruitier calls the Gmail API or Microsoft Graph API to send the email from your connected account.
4. The email appears in your Sent folder in Gmail or Outlook, just as if you had sent it manually.
5. A tracking pixel and link wrapping are applied to the email (when tracking is enabled), allowing you to monitor opens and clicks.
6. Replies from the recipient arrive in your inbox as normal email conversations.
7. Recruitier tracks the message with delivery status, open tracking, and click tracking, giving you visibility into engagement.

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Email Tracking

Recruitier includes comprehensive email tracking capabilities for messages sent through the outreach system. Tracking happens automatically — you do not need to enable anything.

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Checking Connection Status

You can verify your email connection status at any time.

1. Go to Settings from the main navigation.
2. In the Email Integration section, look for:
   • Connected email address — the email associated with your account.
   • Provider — Gmail or Outlook.
   • Status indicator — green for active, red if the connection has expired or been revoked.

If both Gmail and Outlook are connected, Recruitier uses your preferred email provider setting (configurable in Settings) to determine which account sends emails. Gmail is the default unless you explicitly select Outlook.

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Disconnecting Your Email

If you need to switch email providers or revoke Recruitier’s access:

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Troubleshooting Common Issues

Authentication expired error

OAuth tokens have a limited lifetime. If your connection shows as expired:

1. Go to Settings and click “Reconnect” for your email provider.
2. You will go through the OAuth flow again. This refreshes the authentication tokens.
3. Your signature will be re-imported automatically.

This is normal and happens periodically. Google tokens typically last longer than Microsoft tokens, but both expire eventually.

Emails not appearing in Sent folder

This typically happens when the OAuth token has expired silently. Reconnect your email to refresh the authentication, then retry the send. Check the message status in Recruitier — if it shows “Failed,” the token expiration is the most likely cause.

Signature not showing correctly

If your imported signature looks different from what you see in Gmail or Outlook:

1. Go to Settings and use the “Refresh Signature” option to re-import your signature from the provider.
2. Be aware that Recruitier’s cleaning process removes broken images (localhost URLs, empty src attributes, oversized images) and redundant closing phrases. This is intentional to ensure signatures render correctly across all email clients.
3. If the issue persists, consider simplifying your signature in Gmail or Outlook, then refreshing it in Recruitier.

Permission denied during setup

If Google or Microsoft rejects the authorization:

• Ensure your organization’s admin has not blocked third-party app access.
• For Google Workspace accounts, the admin may need to allowlist Recruitier in the Admin Console under Security > API Controls.
• For Microsoft 365 accounts, the admin may need to grant consent for the application in the Azure AD portal.
• Some organizations require admin consent for applications that request Mail.Send scope. Contact your IT administrator.

Cannot send emails after connecting

If your connection shows as active but emails fail to send:

1. Check that your OAuth tokens have not expired — try disconnecting and reconnecting.
2. Verify that the email address you connected is still active and not suspended.
3. For Google Workspace accounts, ensure that the Gmail API is enabled in the Google Admin Console.
4. For Microsoft 365, ensure that your account has a valid Exchange Online license.

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Advanced

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Token Security and Storage

Recruitier takes token security seriously. All OAuth access tokens and refresh tokens are encrypted before storage using AES-GCM (Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode). This is an authenticated encryption scheme that provides both confidentiality and integrity. Even if the database were compromised, the tokens would be unreadable without the encryption key, which is stored separately from the database. The token lifecycle works as follows:

1. During OAuth, the provider returns an access token and a refresh token.
2. Both tokens are encrypted with AES-GCM before being stored in the database.
3. When sending an email, the access token is decrypted and used for the API call.
4. If the access token has expired, the refresh token is decrypted and used to obtain a new access token from the provider.
5. The new access token is encrypted and stored, replacing the expired one.

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How Email Tracking Works Technically

Open tracking uses an invisible tracking pixel — a 1x1 pixel GIF image embedded in the email HTML. The pixel is styled to be completely invisible: width=1, height=1, border=0, visibility=hidden, opacity=0. When the recipient’s email client loads images, it makes an HTTP request to Recruitier’s tracking endpoint at /t/o/{tracking_id}, where tracking_id is a unique UUID assigned to each message. This request increments the open_count on the message record and sets first_opened_at if it is the first open. Click tracking works by wrapping all links in the message body. Instead of linking directly to https://example.com, the link points to /t/c/{tracking_id}?url=https://example.com. When clicked, Recruitier records the click (incrementing click_count and storing the link_url) and then redirects the user to the original URL. Delivery monitoring uses a CronJob that periodically checks for bounces. Messages that have been sent for more than 24 hours without a bounce are marked as “delivered.” Bounced messages have their bounced_at timestamp and bounce_reason recorded.

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How Gmail and Outlook Integrations Differ

While both integrations achieve the same result (sending emails from your account), there are subtle technical differences:

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Connection and Signature Caching Strategy

Your email signature is cached in the database on your user record:

• Gmail signatures are stored in the gmail_signature_html field.
• Outlook signatures are stored in the microsoft_signature_html field.

During the cleaning process, the following transformations are applied:

• Broken images are removed: Images with localhost URLs, empty src attributes, or excessively large dimensions are stripped out.
• Redundant closings are removed: Common closing phrases like “Best regards,” “Met vriendelijke groet,” “Kind regards,” etc. are removed to avoid duplication with the AI-generated message (which includes its own closing).
• The signature is separated from the message body with a <br><br> separator.

This ensures that your signature renders consistently across email clients without broken images or duplicate closings.

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Handling Dual Connections

When both Gmail and Outlook are connected, a “Preferred Email Provider” card appears in the Settings page with radio buttons to choose between Gmail and Outlook. Gmail is selected by default. This means:

• You can switch your active sending provider at any time without disconnecting and reconnecting.
• Both signatures are cached independently, so switching providers does not lose either signature.
• Tracking data is not affected by switching providers — it is tied to the message, not the provider.
• The preference is stored on your user profile and persists across sessions.

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Rate Limits and Fair Use

Both Gmail and Outlook APIs have rate limits that Recruitier respects:

• Gmail: Up to 500 emails per day for regular accounts, higher limits for Google Workspace.
• Outlook/Microsoft 365: Varies by plan, typically 10,000 recipients per day for business accounts.

Recruitier does not batch-send emails. Each outreach message is sent individually through the API, which keeps you well within rate limits for normal recruitment outreach volumes. If you are doing high-volume outreach, be mindful of your provider’s daily sending limits.

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