Understanding email sending via automations
Last updated: August 26, 2026
Onboarded sends emails via automations. There is nothing to connect before your first message goes out — what you set up is the address it comes from, the shape of the message, and the words inside it.
What sends your email
Every Send Email action runs through an email service, chosen in the Email service dropdown on the action itself. There are two.
Onboarded Email Service— Onboarded's own sending infrastructure. It's selected by default on every newSend Emailaction and needs no setup at all. This is the path almost every account uses.SendGrid account— your own SendGrid account, connected as an integration. Most accounts don't have one and don't need one. Reach for it when you've outgrown what the standard templates can express, or when you want your own delivery reporting and suppression lists. Until that integration is configured, the dropdown showsSendGrid account (not connected)and won't let you select it.
Whichever you pick, the rest of the action works the same way: same recipient options, same subject and body fields, same variables.
What the reciever sees in the From line
Until you change it, automation email arrives from no-reply@onboarded.com. To send from your own address instead, authenticate a sending domain and then set Sender email on Settings → Account → Email. Onboarded accepts an address there only once its domain is authenticated, so the two steps go together.
These settings covers emails via automations only. Other email Onboarded sends on your behalf — team invitations, verification codes — still comes from the default Onboarded address, and authenticating a domain doesn't change that.
Where the content of an email lives
A delivered email is assembled from three layers:
The template is the frame — the outer structure, the spacing, whether the message opens with a branded band and whether it ends with a call-to-action button. You pick one in
Email template.The subject and body are the words, and you write them on the action node itself in
Email subjectandEmail body. Both accept variables, so an email can address a candidate by name and more.The theme is the branding — your logo, header colors, button colors. Select one in
Themeand the templates that use branding render in your colors.
The four standard templates
Onboarded provides four templates, and they're the two-by-two of the only structural choices left once the copy moved onto the action: whether the message opens with your logo, and whether it ends with a button.
Template | Opens with your logo | Ends with a button |
|---|---|---|
| No | No |
| No | Yes |
| Yes | No |
| Yes | Yes |
The two header templates render your theme's logo on a colored band with no fallback behind it, so pair them with a theme. A header template on an action with No theme selected opens on an empty logo in an unstyled band.
Example
Take an account that hires warehouse staff and wants every new candidate to get a welcome email the moment a placement is created. The team builds one automation with a Send Email action, leaves Email service on Onboarded Email Service, picks Onboarded - Header + Content + Button, and selects their theme so the message opens on their logo. They write the subject and body on the action, and point the button at the onboarding link an earlier action produced.
Later, when their IT team publishes DNS records for theircompany.com, they set Sender email to onboarding@theircompany.com — and every automation they've already built starts sending from that address.