When you connect your email to Growbots (whether through GMail, SMTP / IMAP, Nylas, or whatever means of connection we might come up with in the future), you are essentially granting Growbots access to your mailbox.
Growbots uses this access to automate tasks related to how Growbots functions:
1) to send emails
2) to detect replies from prospects contacted using Growbots
Sending emails doesn’t require Growbots to read any of your emails, because in order to send a message we only need to know who are we sending that email to, what’s the subject and what’s the content of that email.
In order to detect if a prospect replied to your campaign, we check your mailbox every ~10 minutes, to see if there are any new messages. If there are new replies, we check if that reply was from a prospect contacted from Growbots by pulling contents of that message (full MIME message). We then use that message (email headers, its contents) to determine if that email is a reply from a prospect.
If it is a reply from a prospect, we save it to our database so that you can also see contents of that reply in Growbots app, perform message classification to check if it's a warm reply or a cold reply, and put the email in specific folders (if you have folder management turned on within Growbots Settings).
It’s important to point out that:
- Growbots uses access to your mailbox to send emails and detect replies from prospects;
- Growbots only saves replies from prospects that you have contacted using Growbots app and the system is built to only detect messages from prospects;
- Growbots doesn’t access your contacts or previous emails before you connected your mailbox to Growbots.
What about my credentials?
- credentials to the Growbots account are stored in hashed and salted form (one-way operation, i.e. we can't retrieve them back) as industrial standard dictates.
- credentials to SMTP/IMAP accounts are stored in encrypted form (so they can be decrypted back, as we need to have a way to actually use them to log in to the mailboxes).
