Email deliveries and sender domains

An email delivery method sends one email per lead. Automatic is the recommended mode and the one a new method starts in — it needs no configuration and already carries your brand. Move up the ladder only when you want more: Custom layout to arrange your own blocks, Custom HTML to write the markup yourself, Plain text for a plain body a parser can rely on. Whichever you pick, you control the recipients and the subject, and the address it comes from is set once for your whole account.

Edit it on the delivery method's page, under Email template. On that page the preview sits beside the editor and follows what you type, so you always see the email you are about to change.

Recipients

• To — leave empty to use the buyer's own email address. Fill it in to send somewhere else (a shared inbox, a CRM drop address), and add as many addresses as you need — every lead goes to all of them in one email.
• Cc and Bcc — hidden behind Add Cc/Bcc next to the To field. Same thing, in copy: a manager who watches the flow in Cc, an archive mailbox in Bcc.

Type an address and press Enter or comma to add it, or paste a whole list — commas, semicolons and a column copied from a spreadsheet all work. Invalid addresses are flagged under the field and refused when you save.

Email format

The four modes are a ladder, and the format selector shows it: one row of four, Automatic first and marked Recommended, Plain text last and marked Legacy. The line under the selector describes whichever mode you have picked. Pick one you have not saved yet and that line also tells you what your buyer receives right now, so a switch you have not saved never leaves you guessing. Every mode uses your brand settings.

Automatic

The email is generated from the delivery method's Expected fields: your logo and accent colour at the top, contact details in one table, the rest of the lead in another, values in a readable two-column layout, and your footer at the bottom. Nothing to write, nothing to maintain — add a field to the schema and it appears in the next email.

Fields with no value are left out entirely, so an optional field never leaves a dangling row.

Four switches, all off-by-default except the first:

The branding comes from your account, not from the template: the logo, the business name, the accent colour and the footer are set in Settings → Email → Branding — the same card as your buyer portal's. Set them once and every buyer email wears them, or override them for one delivery method in Email design.

Custom layout

Build the email out of blocks, without writing any HTML. Four kinds:

Drag a block by its handle to reorder it, or use the up/down arrows. Add a field to a section from the picker: it lists the same three groups as the merge-code chips — your Expected fields, the fields of the pipelines wired to this buyer, and the system variables. Leave a field's label empty to keep the one from Expected fields, so renaming it there updates every email that shows it.

Each row also carries a date format, on the button next to its label — the same list of examples the delivery schema offers, applied to that row only. timestamp starts on 08/29/2026 9:25 AM rather than raw, since an ISO instant in a table meant to be read is nobody's idea of a date; every other field starts as-is.

Your logo, accent colour and footer come from your brand settings — or from this delivery method's own design. Blocks carry content, never styling, which is why a layout you build renders exactly as well as the Automatic mode in Outlook and in dark mode.

Two rules follow the Automatic mode: a field with no value on a given lead is left out, so an optional field never leaves a blank row, and a section whose fields are all empty disappears entirely. A layout holds up to 30 blocks, 100 fields per section and 20,000 characters.

Coming from Plain text? The Plain text editor has an Upgrade button: it turns your body into blocks — your paragraphs stay paragraphs, and runs of Label: {{code}} become a table. Nothing is saved until you press Save, and your text stays where it was if you switch back.

Previewing on a real lead. Pick a recent lead of this buyer's pipelines from the dropdown at the top of the preview. That is the only way to see whether the fields you picked are the fields those pipelines really send. Test email always uses fake sample values — a test lands in a real inbox, so it never carries a real lead's details.

Reusing a layout across buyers is what the template library is for.

Custom HTML

Write the markup yourself, or paste a template from another platform. The editor is a code field with line numbers; merge codes work exactly as they do everywhere else, and the preview renders it through the same code that sends it.

Wrap with my brand header/footer, the switch above the code field, decides how much of the email is yours. On (the default) it puts your logo, accent colour and footer around your markup, so a fragment — a table of fields, say — comes out looking like the automatic mode. Off, nothing is added: your HTML is the entire email, logo included or not, as you wrote it.

Starting from your current email, as HTML gives you the body only — the logo and footer you see in the preview come from the wrapper, not from your markup, so turning the switch off removes them. If you had already turned it off on this endpoint, converting again leaves it off.

If your template is a complete HTML document (it starts with <!DOCTYPE html> or <html>), the wrapper switches itself off and stays off: nesting one document inside another would give the buyer two headers. That is the case when you paste a whole export from Leadbyte, boberdoo or a similar tool — paste it, set the recipients and the subject, and it goes out as written.

What we change on the way out, always:

• Scripts, iframes, objects, embeds, on… handlers and javascript: links are removed. They cannot work in a mailbox and they should not run in your preview either. Everything else — tables, inline styles, <style> blocks, Outlook conditional comments, images — is kept byte for byte.
• Merge-code values are HTML-escaped. A lead field containing <b> arrives as the text <b>, not as markup. Lead data is posted by whoever sends you leads, so it is never treated as trusted HTML.
• A plain-text part is generated from your HTML by stripping the tags, and sent alongside it. Every delivery email carries both parts.

Size limit: 100 KB. Gmail clips a message over 102 KB and hides the rest behind a "View entire message" link, which would cut a lead in half. The editor shows the size as you type and the save is refused past the limit — move long content to a linked page rather than into the email.

Writing HTML that survives a mailbox is its own craft: use tables rather than flexbox, inline your styles, keep the width around 600px, and set explicit light backgrounds so a dark-mode client cannot leave dark text on dark paint. We sanitize and we bound the size; we do not guarantee how your markup renders in Outlook. If that is the part you would rather not think about, use Automatic.

Plain text

Your own body, sent exactly as you write it, with {{variable}} merge codes. The picker shows it last and marks it legacy, because the three modes above serve most senders better — but it is supported for good and never rewritten. Use it when a buyer parses these emails with a mail rule or a CRM intake and needs a fixed shape, or when you simply prefer your own words.

Switching formats

You take your email with you. Moving into a mode you have never used asks where to start rather than dropping you on a blank page:

• Into Custom layout: your automatic email as blocks — your fields already grouped into Contact and Lead details sections, ready to rearrange. Coming from Plain text, it offers your own text instead. You can also start from a template, or from a blank canvas.
• Into Custom HTML: the real markup of the email you send today, merge codes in place, wrapped in your brand — or an empty field, for markup of your own or a template exported from another platform.

You get your work back when you return. Every mode keeps its own body in the delivery method, so switching between Automatic, Custom layout, Custom HTML and Plain text — and back — always hands you your own words untouched. A mode that already holds something never asks the question again: you land straight back in it.

Nothing is saved until you press Save. A starting point lands in the form, for you to look at and change; the buyer keeps receiving what was there before until you save. A new email method starts in Automatic: it needs no configuration and already wears your brand.

Email design

Every mode above wears your account's branding — the logo, business name, accent colour and footer set in Settings → Email → Branding. Set them once and every buyer email carries them.

If you sell under more than one brand, the Design card on the delivery method's page overrides that branding for this delivery method only. Open it under the format selector: it is closed by default and its one line tells you what this email wears — Organization branding, or Custom — logo + accent, with a dot in the colour it actually uses.

Turn Use organization branding off and four fields appear:

An empty field inherits. Each one shows what it inherits as its placeholder, so a design that overrides only the colour keeps your logo, your name and your footer without you writing them twice. Clear a field to go back to inheriting it.

Nothing here touches your account's branding, your buyer portal, or any other delivery method — and the address the email comes from never changes with it, that is the sender domain. Turning the switch back on returns this email to your account's branding exactly as it was.

The preview beside the card follows every keystroke, and Test email sends the design you are looking at, not the one that is saved. Like everything else on this page, nothing reaches a buyer until you press Save.

Custom HTML has this card only while Wrap with my brand header/footer is on: with the wrapper off, your markup is the design. Plain text has no card at all.

Reusing a design across buyers is what the template library is for — a template can be saved with its design.

Merge codes

Click any variable button to insert it: the fields declared in Expected fields, the fields of the pipelines wired to this buyer, and the system variables {{lead_id}}, {{timestamp}}, {{source}}, {{pipeline}}, {{buyer}}, {{quality_score}}, {{quality_grade}}.

Subjects take merge codes too.

Templates written before the branded editor use the older single-brace form — New lead: {email}. It still renders, everywhere, and always will: both spellings mean the same thing to the engine. The buttons insert the {{code}} form, so when you move an endpoint to Custom layout or Custom HTML the subject's known codes are rewritten to match — same result, one spelling on screen.

A code with no value renders as nothing — a buyer never reads a raw {{token}}. In Plain text, the line it leaves empty is cleaned up too; in Custom HTML your markup is left exactly as written, since removing a line there would mean rewriting your layout. The editor warns you about codes that match nothing at all (usually a typo, or a field missing from Expected fields).

Formatting a value inline

Add one or more modifiers inside a code to reformat its value:

Modifiers chain left to right: {{name|lower|title}}. A value that can't be converted (an unparseable date, a phone number with no country) is sent unchanged rather than dropped.

These are the same modifiers the webhook body template uses — one syntax across the product. Lead auto-replies share the syntax too, with fallbacks and case but no date or phone reformatting. The older single-brace form {zip} keeps working everywhere, for good; the editor just inserts the newer one.

Reformatting the same field for every email is a job for a per-field transform instead — set it once on the schema rather than in each code.

Preview and test

The preview renders the email with sample data — or with a real recent lead, picked from the dropdown at its top. On the delivery method's page it sits beside the editor and stays there; in the panels where a delivery method is edited in place it is a section you can fold away, open by default everywhere but Plain text. Except in Plain text it is built by the same code that builds the real delivery — sanitizing included — so what you see is what the buyer opens.

Test email sends a real message — to the To addresses if you set any, otherwise to your own. It goes out from the same sender domain a real lead would use, with a [TEST] subject prefix and fake sample values. A test never copies Cc or Bcc.

Sender domains

Until you verify a domain, lead emails go out from LeadMove's shared address. Buyers see LeadMove, not you — and a banner on this editor says so until you fix it.

Add your own in Settings → Email → Sender domains (owners and admins). You add a domain, publish the DNS records it gives you (DKIM, SPF, MX), and it becomes usable once verified — pending or failed domains are visible but can't be selected. Set one as the default: every email delivery uses it unless overridden.

LeadMove sends email through Resend, our email provider. That is why the records name resend and amazonses.com: they authorize Resend to send as your domain, and Resend is what confirms them once they are live.

To use a different domain for one buyer, open the buyer's Settings → Delivery methods → From domain → Edit and pick it. Leave it on "Use organization default" for everyone else.

The number of sender domains you can hold depends on your plan — see Plans and quotas.

Why this matters

Buyers filter aggressively, and lead emails look exactly like the mail spam filters distrust: automated, repetitive, sent to an address that never replies. A verified domain you own gives those messages an authenticated sender, which is what inbox providers check first. It also means the buyer sees your brand in the From line, and can reply to an address you control.

Common questions

Do I need a sender domain to start? No. Deliveries work from day one on the shared address. Verify your own domain before you scale volume with a buyer who filters hard.

How many people can receive one lead email? Up to 50 addresses across To, Cc and Bcc together. An address listed twice — or in both To and Cc — is only sent to once.

A buyer says my leads land in spam. Verify a sender domain and set it as default, then ask the buyer to allowlist that address. Sending from a domain you own is the part LeadMove can fix; the allowlist is the part they can.

My buyer's system reads these emails automatically. Will Automatic break it? Every email is sent with both an HTML part and a plain-text part, and the text part keeps a stable Label: value shape, one field per line. If their parser needs an exact wording you control, use Plain text — that mode is never rewritten.

I pasted a template from my old platform and the merge codes are all empty. Every platform has its own code syntax. Ours is {{field}} (and the older {field}), so a pasted template's [field], %%field%% or ~field~ will not resolve — replace them with the chips above. The editor lists any code that matches nothing in this buyer's schema.

Can I use a different logo for one buyer? Yes. Open that delivery method, turn Use organization branding off in the Design card, and upload one. It applies to that email method only — your account's branding, your buyer portal and every other buyer stay as they are.

Can I use my own <style> block, or media queries? Yes, both are kept as written. Bear in mind that several mail clients strip <style> entirely, which is why inline styles are the safer bet for anything that must not be lost.

Should I use Custom layout or Custom HTML? Custom layout, unless you already have HTML you want to keep. It gives you the same arrangement — titled tables, a paragraph, a button — without you having to own the mailbox quirks: Outlook's table rendering, dark-mode inversion, the 600px width. Custom HTML exists for templates you are migrating and for layouts the blocks cannot express.

Does the email carry LeadMove's name anywhere? No. The delivery email is white-label: your logo, your name, your colour, your footer. Your buyers never see ours — the From line is the one exception until you verify a sending domain, which is what the banner is about.

The shared-domain banner is showing on a buyer who has their own domain. It shouldn't: the banner runs the same four steps a real send does, and stops at the first one that resolves. If it's showing, that buyer's domain is likely no longer verified — check its status in Settings → Email → Sender domains.

What happens if I delete a domain that a buyer uses? That buyer falls back to the organization default, and to LeadMove's shared address if there isn't one. Deliveries never stop for a missing domain.