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Understanding the permissions required for email account integration in Campaigns
Understanding the permissions required for email account integration in Campaigns

What you need to know about permissions for email account setup in Campaigns

Updated over a week ago

This help article covers the required permissions when connecting a new email account in Hunter Campaigns. Depending on your plan, you can connect up to 20 email accounts.
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Supported email account connections in Campaigns

Hunter supports three different types of email account connections:

  • Gmail/Google Workspace email accounts

  • Outlook/Microsoft email accounts

  • SMTP/ IMAP email account connections


How does Hunter Campaigns send emails?

When you connect your email account, Hunter will schedule and send emails on your behalf through your connected email account. This means the emails will be sent through your email client's server, not Hunter's.

This integration enables Hunter Campaigns to access your account, send and read emails, and track interactions, such as opens and replies. The secure OAuth authentication process safeguards your privacy, ensuring your login credentials remain confidential and never disclosed to third parties. Additionally, we ensure the security of your data and credentials by encrypting them with AES-256-CBC.


What is OAuth?

OAuth (Open Authorization) is commonly used to allow users to sign in to third-party websites or applications using their credentials from a service like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Twitter, without creating a new account specifically for that third-party service.

OAuth utilizes tokens rather than direct login credentials, bypassing the need to expose passwords. These tokens act as a secure key and the exchange between Hunter and the authorization server is conducted over HTTPS, ensuring that the data is encrypted during transit.

Remember that Hunter can only access the information that has been explicitly granted permission, and nothing beyond that.

๐Ÿ‘‰ You can easily opt out of giving Hunter access to your data by disconnecting your account in the Campaigns settings or removing the access directly from your Google or Microsoft account.


Gmail/Google Workspace email account connections

When you connect your Gmail/Google Workspace account through Google Sign-in, you are first asked to enter your credentials and allow Hunter access to your name, email address, profile picture, and language preferences. This process is completely protected by OAuth, and Hunter can only access the information that has been granted permission.

We've implemented the latest OAuth granular consent as requested by Google for all third-party apps (starting from June 14, 2024).

After signing in to Hunter, you are requested to provide Hunter access to your account to ensure it can be used to send emails.

Take a look at our Privacy policy and our Terms of Service for more details.

All the information we ask you to access is necessary to get access to your email account, schedule and manage your email campaigns, and nothing more. If you want to learn how we treat and store your data, you can find more about this in our Data Processing Agreement.

What happens when you connect your Gmail/Google Workspace account?

Hunter will request access to the necessary permission to send emails using your connected email account, detect replies and provide them in Hunter's Inbox. These are:

View your email messages and settings

  • View your email messages

  • Search your email messages

  • View your settings (e.g. filters and labels)

Manage drafts and send emails:

  • View and manage draft messages

  • Send new emails

Associate you with your personal info on Google

  • Know who you are on Google and associate you with the personal info you have made public

See your personal info, including any personal info you've made publicly available

  • See your full name

  • See your profile picture

  • See your gender

  • See your preferred languages

  • See any other information you've made publicly available

โ„น๏ธ Only your full name and profile picture are used by Hunter to ensure the sender name and profile picture match the one you have for your Gmail/Google Workspace account. The other information (gender, preferred languages and other info) aren't used by Hunter.

See your primary Google Account email address

  • See the primary email address associated with your Google Account

โ„น๏ธ Please note that you can remove this connection anytime directly from your Google Account.


Outlook/Microsoft email account connections

When you connect your Outlook/Microsoft email account through OAuth to send email campaigns through Hunter, similar to the Google account connection, we request access to your profile data and permissions to manage and send emails on your behalf. By accepting these permissions, you grant Hunter access to:

  • Read your profile and maintain access to data: required to send emails with your profile settings.

  • Access to read, write and send emails: required to create, manage and send emails on your behalf.


SMTP/IMAP email account connections

To use this functionality, Hunter needs access to your email servers:

  • Outgoing Server- SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send emails and store them in your Sent folder.

  • Incoming Server - IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to read emails, allowing us to retrieve status updates such as replies, bounces or opens.

To allow Hunter access to these servers, you will first have to establish a connection using your email account credentials (the email address you wish to connect to and the associated password). This allows us to establish a connection between your email service provider and Hunter.

Your data and credentials are protected and encrypted using AES-256-CBC, a widely employed encryption algorithm in numerous applications for ensuring secure data transmission and storage. For more details, see our Security Policy.

At this point, the application will automatically retrieve your server settings if possible. Otherwise, should we fail to retrieve this information, you will be asked to configure your incoming and outgoing servers and ports, to allow Hunter access to your mailbox.

To connect your email account with the right server settings, please visit your email provider's Help Center.

Once a connection is established, Hunter gains access to your mailbox for both sending and reading emails. We utilize SMTP to deliver outgoing emails and store them in the Sent folder.

When checking for incoming emails, our focus is solely on those associated with messages sent from Hunter, to allow us to retrieve status updates such as replies, bounces, or opens.

Security Protection for SMTP/IMAP

The SMTP/IMAP connection utilizes TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer) or STARTTLS (Start Transport Layer Security) protocols to ensure a secure communication channel.

We prohibit using non-encrypted connections to ensure that all the data exchanged between Hunter and your email server is consistently encrypted, to protect sensitive information, such as email content, login credentials, and other personal data, from unauthorized access or interception by third parties.

To enhance security and ensure compatibility across different email servers, we support both SSL and STARTTLS encryption protocols. Upon linking your email account, our system automatically determines the appropriate protection type based on your server's port configuration.

Should automatic detection fail, you'll need to select the correct protocol manually. At that point, Hunter will be able to retrieve the correct associated SMTP Server Port automatically.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Should you need help connecting your email account through SMTP/IMAP connection, we have written an entire help article to guide you in the process HERE.

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