Connect your own email accounts

Clay can sell you managed sending accounts, and it can also send from mailboxes you already own. Bringing your own accounts means you keep the domain, the DNS, and the mailboxes, and you connect each one to Clay once. Two paths cover almost everything: OAuth for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and SMTP for other providers or for migrating a batch of accounts in one go.

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When to bring your own

Two situations make connecting your own accounts the right call:

• Sending from your real main domain — a good fit when the people you're writing to already recognize your company, and worth watching closely on bounce and spam rates.
• Migrating mailboxes you already bought from another vendor, so you can keep using accounts that are already warmed and paid for.

Bringing your own accounts also means the surrounding infrastructure stays with you. DNS records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), the warmup decision, and domain-level health are yours to manage, because Clay doesn't control the accounts.

Domain deliverability monitoring is available for accounts purchased through Clay. For your own accounts, keep an eye on the bounce rate in campaign analytics and keep daily volume conservative per mailbox. Deliverability and domain health covers the numbers to watch and where to find them.

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Every method starts in the same place:

1. Open Campaigns in the sidebar and go to the Email accounts tab.
2. Click Add email account.
3. Under How do you want to set up your sending accounts?, choose Bring your own accounts, then click Continue.
   • This step only appears if managed accounts are enabled for your workspace. If they aren't, the modal opens straight to the list of connection methods and you can skip it.
   • If managed accounts are enabled but your plan doesn't include them, Buy managed accounts appears locked with an Available on Growth+ prompt, and Bring your own accounts is already selected for you.
4. On the Connect your email accounts step, select a method and click Continue.

Connect with Google OAuth

Before the first mailbox on a domain can connect, a Google Workspace admin authorizes the Clay Sequencer app in the Admin panel. It's a one-time step per Workspace, so if a colleague has already done it for your domain, go straight to connecting the account.

1. Select Gmail (OAuth) and click Continue.
2. On Is your Google Workspace already configured?, pick the answer that matches your situation.
   • Yes, it's already set up — the app was authorized previously, and clicking Continue takes you to sign-in.
   • No, I need to configure it now — reveals the admin steps below. You'll need Workspace admin access, and the modal also links a video walkthrough.
3. In the Search for Clay Sequencer step, copy the Clay Sequencer Client ID with the copy button next to it. Your admin needs it to find the app.

Authorize the Clay Sequencer app in Google Workspace

1. Open your Google Workspace Admin panel — the modal links directly to it — and go to Security → API Controls → App Access Control.
2. Click Configure new app.
3. Paste the Client ID into the search bar and click Search.
4. Select Clay Sequencer (Web) from the results.
5. Choose which organizational units the authorization covers — either All in [your org] (all users) or the specific units holding the domains you want to send from — then click Continue.
6. Under Access to Google Data, select Trusted, then click Continue.
7. Review the summary and click Finish.

Google can take up to 24 hours to apply the change across the Workspace. If a connection attempt returns an access-denied error in that window, the authorization is fine — it just hasn't reached every account yet, so wait and try again.

If connecting still fails more than 24 hours after your admin finished, reach out through the Help button with the address you're trying to add and Clay support can look into it.

Connect the account

1. Back in the modal, click Continue to reach the Connect your email account step.
2. Decide who can see the account using the Only show to me and workspace admins toggle. On — the default — means This email account will only be visible to you and workspace admins; switching it off means This email account will be visible to all workspace editors.
3. Click Connect your Google account, sign in, and grant access.
4. The last step is Enable email warming to improve deliverability. The accounts you just added are listed with warmup already checked, so clicking Enable warming turns it on for all of them. Unchecking every account changes that same button to Continue without warming. Email warmup builds sender reputation before you send at volume, so leaving it on is the recommendation for almost every account.

Connect with Microsoft OAuth

Microsoft follows the same shape, with one difference: instead of configuring the app in an admin console, Clay generates an admin consent URL for you to pass to your Microsoft 365 admin. Consent is granted once for the whole organization.

1. Select Outlook (OAuth) and click Continue.
2. On Is your Microsoft 365 already configured?, choose Yes, it's already set up or No, I need to configure it now.
3. Under Copy the admin consent URL, copy the URL Clay has generated.
4. Share with your admin — send the URL to whoever administers your Microsoft 365 tenant.
5. Admin grants consent — the admin opens the URL and grants consent on behalf of the organization.
6. Click Continue, set the Only show to me and workspace admins toggle, then click Connect your Microsoft account and sign in.
7. Finish on the Enable email warming to improve deliverability step — the same last screen as the Google path, and the same choice between Enable warming and Continue without warming.

If the consent page returns a server error, that's usually a temporary hiccup rather than a sign the consent failed. Try connecting through OAuth anyway — and if the connection doesn't go through either, have your admin open the URL again a few minutes later.

Connect via SMTP

SMTP is the most hands-on of the four methods and the one to reach for when OAuth isn't an option: a provider without an OAuth path, or a batch of mailboxes you're migrating in. There's no admin authorization step, because you supply the mail server details and credentials yourself. Where Google or Microsoft OAuth is available, it's the easier route.

Add one account manually

1. Select Manual SMTP setup and click Continue.
2. Fill in the SMTP settings and IMAP settings sections with the fields below.
3. Click Add account, then choose whether to enable warmup on the Enable email warming to improve deliverability step.

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Two provider-specific details to watch for:

• Gmail mailboxes need an app password for SMTP access rather than the normal account password. You can create one in your Google account security settings, under 2-step verification.
• If you enter an Outlook or Office 365 hostname, the modal points you back to Microsoft OAuth. Outlook retired IMAP access in 2022, so OAuth is the path that works for those mailboxes.

Upload accounts in bulk

1. Select Bulk CSV upload and click Continue.
2. On the Upload a CSV step, click Download example CSV to get a file with the exact structure, fill it in, and upload it. A file with a column missing returns The uploaded CSV has missing or incomplete data, and the example file is the quickest way to check the shape.
3. On Select accounts to import, tick the addresses you want — everything is ticked by default — and click Add accounts.
4. Choose whether to enable warmup on the Enable email warming to improve deliverability step.

Your CSV needs one row per mailbox, with these columns:

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Any accounts that don't import are listed back to you grouped by reason, so a whole batch with the same problem can be fixed in one pass. A rejected login is the most common one, and it's usually the app password point above.

Reconnecting a disconnected account

Google and Microsoft revoke access tokens from time to time — after a stretch of inactivity, or as part of a routine security check. When that happens, the account shows Auth error in the Status column of the Email accounts tab, and hovering the badge tells you which credentials couldn't be verified.

An account in Auth error can't send or fetch replies until it's reconnected. Reconnecting is the action to take — the sends and replies waiting behind the account come through once it's reachable again, and pausing leads by hand doesn't speed that up.

1. On the Email accounts tab, find the account and open its 3-dot menu.
2. Click Reconnect.
3. Sign in again with the same mailbox. The flow only accepts the address that's already connected, which keeps you from re-authenticating into a different inbox by accident.
4. You'll see an Email account reconnected confirmation when it lands.

Reconnect only appears on an account connected through OAuth, and only while that account is in Auth error — a healthy account doesn't show the option. It opens in a pop-up window, so if nothing appears, allow pop-ups for Clay and try again.

For an account added through Manual SMTP setup or Bulk CSV upload, delete it and add it again with current credentials — that's the reliable fix. For accounts purchased through Clay, contact Clay support and they'll resolve it on their side.

FAQs

Why does an admin have to authorize the Clay Sequencer app at all?

Campaign sending comes with inbox warmup, which sends and receives mail on the account's behalf. That puts the app outside the scope Google and Microsoft will fully verify themselves, so the decision moves to the person who administers your domain instead. Every cold email sequencer that includes warmup works this way.

The practical upside is that it's a single step per Workspace or organization. Once it's done, every mailbox on the domain can connect without involving the admin again.

Can I connect a personal Gmail or Outlook account?

OAuth connections are for business mailboxes on a domain you administer, through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. A personal address — a Gmail or Hotmail mailbox, for example — can't be connected this way.

That lines up with what works for cold outbound anyway: a domain you control is what lets you set DNS records, spread sending across several mailboxes, and protect your reputation over time.

Will campaign emails show up in my Sent folder?

For accounts connected with Google or Microsoft OAuth, yes — campaign sends land in the mailbox's Sent folder alongside everything else you send. For SMTP accounts it depends on the mail server, and most don't copy messages sent over SMTP into Sent.

Either way, replies are fetched from the mailbox over IMAP and collected on the campaign's Replies tab, so you can answer from the same address the email went out from.

Clay says the address is already in use — what now?

Smartlead allows an email address to be connected to one account at a time, so an address that was previously linked to another Smartlead account has to be released there before it can connect here.

If you have access to that Smartlead account, delete the address there and connect it again in Clay. If you don't, contact Clay support with the address you're trying to add and they can remove it for you.