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A sending identity is the account your campaigns go out from — the address recipients see in their inbox. AlpacaRelay never sends from a shared address of ours, so you connect your own.
You only need this to send campaigns from AlpacaRelay. Designing emails, previewing them, exporting the HTML, and pushing designs to your own ESP all work without one.

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What you can connect

Gmail, over Google sign-in. That’s the one option today — there’s no SMTP or custom-domain setup yet.
Sending from your own domain is a common ask and isn’t supported yet. If you need hello@yourcompany.com as the visible sender, the practical route today is to design in AlpacaRelay and send through an ESP you’ve already set up.

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Connect Gmail

1

Open Connected apps

Click your workspace name, then Settings → Connected apps.
2

Choose Gmail

Click Connect app and pick Gmail. You’ll be asked to confirm, then a Google window opens — allow the popup.
3

Sign in and grant permission

Sign in as the Gmail account you want to send from and approve the request.
4

Check it landed

Gmail appears in your connected apps, showing the address it resolved and a Connected badge. That address is read from Google directly, so what you see is genuinely the mailbox you’ll send from.
Connected apps is only visible to workspace owners. If it isn’t in your Settings, ask an owner to connect the account — everyone in the workspace can then send using it.

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What AlpacaRelay can and can’t do with your Gmail

The connection requests a single Gmail permission: send email on your behalf. There is no read permission in the request at all, so mailbox access isn’t a matter of policy — it’s not technically possible with the access you grant.

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Connect more than one

You can connect several Gmail accounts to one workspace and choose which a campaign sends from. The same address can’t be added twice. This is how you keep, say, news@ and founders@ separate without switching workspaces.

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Use it

Once connected, pick the sending account when you set up a campaign under Campaigns. A campaign won’t send without one — you’ll get Connect and select a sending account if you try.
Test emails don’t need a connected identity. You can check how an email lands in a real inbox before setting any of this up.

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Sending rate

Campaigns are paced deliberately rather than blasted: roughly one email every three seconds, up to about 400 per day. That means a 400-recipient campaign takes around twenty minutes of steady sending, and a larger audience spills into the following day. When you set a campaign up, the recipient estimate tells you in advance if the audience won’t clear in one day.
Your Google account’s own limit applies on top of this — a few hundred messages a day on personal Gmail, higher on Workspace. Whichever limit is lower is the one you’ll hit.

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Disconnect

Disconnect on the Gmail row removes the identity and revokes AlpacaRelay’s access at Google in one step. Nothing is left behind holding a token.
Check your campaigns first. A scheduled campaign pointing at a disconnected identity fails rather than falling back to another one. Reconnecting creates a fresh identity, so you’ll need to select it on any campaign that referenced the old one.
You can also remove access from your Google account’s connected apps at any time. Do that and sending stops immediately — AlpacaRelay finds out when a send fails, so disconnecting here is the tidier path.

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Troubleshooting

It was blocked as a popup. Allow popups for AlpacaRelay and click Connect again — the click itself is what permits the window to open.
It’s owner-only. Ask a workspace owner to connect the account.
Either nothing is connected, or the campaign doesn’t have an account chosen. Both live in the campaign’s setup.
The identity was probably disconnected, or access was revoked at Google. Reconnect, then select the new identity on the campaign.
That’s the pacing described above, not a stall. Steady sending protects your address’s reputation far more than speed helps you.