To send an email campaign with Claude, connect OwnMailServer and ask in plain English: "draft our Black Friday email to the Customers list". Claude saves a draft and sends nothing. Ask it to change the subject, send you a test, then "send it Tuesday at 9am". After it goes out, ask "how did the campaign do?" and you get delivered, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces and complaints, with rates.
This guide walks through a full campaign, from the list to the results, and covers what Claude can and can't do along the way.
What you need before you start
- An OwnMailServer account with a verified sending domain. Claude can set this up too: it adds your domain, gives you the DNS records and checks them. See the Claude connector page for the sign-up flow.
- The connector added to Claude. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors, add OwnMailServer (or a custom connector with
https://api.ownmailserver.com/mcp), sign in and click Allow. - "Send email" ticked on the Allow screen. Without it, Claude can read your results but not send. Tick Manage sending domains and settings too if you want Claude to switch on open and click tracking.
- A list of people who agreed to hear from you. Customers, newsletter signups, members. Not bought or scraped lists.
Step 1: Put your subscribers on a contact list
A broadcast goes to a contact list. Ask Claude to make one and add people to it:
Create a contact list called Customers and add these people: …
Paste names and addresses, or the contents of a CSV export from your shop or CRM. Claude adds up to 500 contacts at a time, and a list holds up to 100,000. Invalid addresses are reported and skipped. Adding someone doesn't email them.
You can keep the list tidy from the chat too:
| You say | What happens |
|---|---|
| "Fix Kat's name, it's Cat" | Changes the contact's name. |
| "Take these three off the list" | Marks them unsubscribed, so they're never mailed again even if re-added. |
| "Add Dov back, he asked" | Resubscribes someone who unsubscribed. |
| "How many people on Customers would get it?" | Counts subscribed contacts, leaving out anyone unsubscribed or suppressed. |
Claude refuses to resubscribe anyone who bounced or marked your email as spam. Mailing them again damages your sender reputation, so only you can lift those blocks, in the dashboard.
Step 2: Ask Claude to draft the campaign
Draft our Black Friday email to the Customers list. 25% off everything until Monday. Friendly, short, one button to the shop. Start with "Hi {{first_name|there}}".
Claude writes the email and saves it as a draft. Nothing is sent. It shows you the subject, sender and body so you can read it in the chat.
Edits work the same way:
- "Change the subject line to something shorter."
- "Use the VIP list instead."
- "Send it from news@ourshop.com, with replies to support@."
Each edit updates the same draft. {{first_name}}, {{last_name}} and {{email}} are filled in per person. Every copy gets an unsubscribe link: if the email doesn't have one where you want it, we add a short footer.
Step 3: Send yourself a test
Send me a test.
Claude sends test copies to up to 5 addresses, usually your own. The subject starts with "[Test]", so it's easy to spot, and test copies don't count in the campaign's results. Open it on your phone and your laptop, check the links, and ask for changes if anything looks wrong.
Step 4: Send it now, or schedule it
Send it Tuesday at 9am.
Claude schedules the campaign, up to 30 days ahead. If it doesn't know your time zone, it asks, so the email goes out at your 9am, not the server's. Changed your mind?
Actually, hold off.
A scheduled campaign goes back to being a draft. You can also send a draft straight away with "send it now". Drafts and scheduled campaigns also appear in your dashboard with Send now, Unschedule and Delete draft buttons.
Prefer clicking? The dashboard does the same
Everything above also works in the dashboard's Broadcasts page, without an AI app. New broadcast saves a draft, with plain text and optional HTML. The draft shows a preview filled in for the list's first contact, with the HTML rendered as it will look. You can edit any field, Send a test to up to 5 addresses (your own is filled in), Schedule with a date, time and time zone up to 30 days ahead, or Send now after ticking a confirm box. Start a campaign in Claude and finish it in the dashboard, or the other way round: it's the same draft.
What happens when it sends
Each person on the list gets their own copy. Anyone who unsubscribed, bounced or complained earlier is skipped automatically. Copies go out as fast as your account's daily limit allows. A new account is still in IP warm-up, so a large list may take a few days, and the campaign carries on by itself as the limit frees up instead of failing.
Who gets it is fixed when sending starts. People added to the list afterwards wait for the next campaign.
Step 5: Ask how the campaign did
How did the Black Friday campaign do?
Claude answers with the campaign's results and rates:
| Number | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Delivered | Copies the recipient's mail server accepted. |
| Opens and open rate | People whose email client loaded the email's images. Approximate: Apple Mail and some security scanners load images by themselves. |
| Clicks and click rate | People who clicked a link. The most reliable sign of interest. |
| Unsubscribes | People who left the list from this email. |
| Bounces | Addresses that didn't work (hard) or were temporarily refused (soft). Hard bounces are suppressed for good. |
| Spam complaints | People who clicked "Report spam". Keep this under 0.1%. |
Opens and clicks are only counted when tracking is on for the sending domain. It's off by default. Ask "turn on click tracking for ourshop.com" before you send, and Claude switches it on.
Then keep asking, because the answers come from your real data:
- "Which addresses bounced, and why?"
- "Compare this with last month's newsletter."
- "Did Gmail or Microsoft accept less of it?"
- "Make me a one-page summary I can send the team."
Our guide to email campaign reporting with AI covers the questions worth asking and what the numbers mean.
What Claude can't do
Some things stay in the dashboard on purpose, so a chat can't change them by accident:
- Creating or seeing API keys, and webhook signing secrets.
- Removing a sending domain.
- Billing and payment details.
- Lifting a bounce or spam-complaint block on an address.
Recipient addresses in Claude's answers are masked (j***@example.com) unless you asked about that address. The dashboard shows them in full.
Keeping campaigns out of spam
Claude makes sending easy, so the usual rules matter more, not less:
- Only mail people who opted in. Complaints hurt your reputation more than anything else. We pause an account automatically if complaints pass 0.3% in a day.
- Keep your domain authenticated. Ask Claude "check my domain health" and it checks SPF, DKIM and DMARC and tells you the exact record to publish for anything missing. Gmail and Yahoo require this for bulk senders.
- Clean old lists before a big send. A list that hasn't been mailed in a year will bounce. Send to recent subscribers first.
- Send at a steady rhythm. A regular weekly or monthly campaign builds a better reputation than a burst every few months.
If mail is landing in spam already, start with why emails go to spam.
What it costs
The connector comes with pay-as-you-go sending. Each copy of a campaign is one email, at $0.20 per 1,000, with a $10 monthly minimum that covers the first 50,000 emails and a $10 one-time setup fee. A weekly newsletter to 5,000 people is about 20,000 emails a month, inside the minimum. Senders of 200,000+ emails a month get a dedicated IP. Full details are on the pricing page.
Want to try it? Sign up, add OwnMailServer in Claude, and ask: "Draft a broadcast to my Test list, send me a test, then schedule it for tomorrow at 9am."