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Use cases → Email operations

Distribute and track mass surveys via Gmail

A delegated service account sends survey invitations to large recipient lists and tracks responses, centralising delivery and engagement data for reporting.

Who it is forInternal communications, HR, or research teams needing auditable survey outreach at scale.
APIsGmail API, Sheets API
Typical scopesgmail.send, gmail.readonly, sheets

The problem

Bulk surveys sent from personal accounts trip spam thresholds or lose auditability. Manual tracking of who received, opened, or responded is error-prone, and delivery status is scattered across users’ sent mail. Centralising the send and tracking avoids lost invitations, but requires reliable batching and reconciliation.

How it works

  1. Prepare a recipient list in a Google Sheet, including unique tracking tokens per recipient.
  2. A delegated service account composes and sends survey invitation emails via the Gmail API, impersonating a neutral sender (e.g., surveys@).
  3. Track delivery status and bounces by reading the service account’s sent and inbox folders.
  4. Record engagement (e.g., clicks, replies) back to the Sheet for live reporting.
  5. Schedule retries for soft bounces or deferred messages, updating status with each attempt.

What changes

Survey delivery is auditable, tracked, and centralised; response rates and delivery issues are visible in one place without relying on end-users’ mailboxes.

The trap in this one. Gmail API's per-user send quota applies to the delegated account per user impersonated, but Google silently throttles or defers messages if too many are sent in a short window—even when under documented limits. Deferred sends return HTTP 200, but are queued for later delivery, which breaks time-sensitive surveys and leads to inconsistent delivery times across recipients unless you explicitly check message status after send.

Questions people ask

Can the service account send on behalf of any user?

Yes, with domain-wide delegation, but for survey distribution, it should use a single neutral account to maintain audit trails and avoid user confusion.

How are bounces and delivery failures handled?

You must poll the service account's inbox for bounce notifications and update your tracking sheet; Gmail does not surface bounces via the send API call.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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