# Sending a single email

Learn how to send a one-off email to a college program on ProductiveRecruit, to one coach or several on that staff, with templates, attachments, and what happens after you hit send.

Sometimes you don't want a whole campaign, you just want to reach out to one school right now. The composer does exactly that: pick the college program, choose one coach or several from that staff, start from a template or write from scratch, and send from your own connected email.

## Every email goes to one program

A single email is always addressed to one **college program**, and everyone you put on it comes from that program's staff. That's what keeps your outreach organized: the message gets logged against that school, shows up on its program page, and counts toward its contact history.

Start from a program's profile page and the program is already filled in. Start from your inbox and you'll pick it from the college dropdown at the top of the composer, which then shows the program name in the header.

If you haven't connected an email account yet, ProductiveRecruit routes you to setup first. See [Connecting your Gmail account](/docs/email/connect-gmail). The same redirect happens if your connection needs re-verifying or if your account is temporarily paused for sending too much too fast.

## Choose your recipients

**To** is a searchable multi-select listing every coach on that program's staff with a valid email address, plus any additional contacts you've added for that school yourself. Pick just the recruiting coordinator, or select the head coach and both assistants. There's no limit.

Selecting more than one coach sends **one email addressed to all of them**, not a separate copy each. They'll see each other in the To line, and it counts as a single send against your [daily cap](/docs/email/deliverability-and-limits). If you'd rather each coach get their own individual message, use a [campaign](/docs/email/campaigns) instead.

**Add cc/bcc** opens two more fields:

- **cc** offers the same coach list, plus a box for any other email address, which is how most athletes loop in a parent.
- **bcc** offers yourself, and if you're on an organization account, your club or school coaches and admins so they can keep an eye on your outreach.

## Write the email

Fill in a **Subject** and the rich-text **message** body, and attach up to 3 files at 7MB each, any file type.

Selecting a saved template fills in the subject and body, swapping in this college and coach along with your own profile details. Your signature is appended automatically. Read more in [Email templates & variables](/docs/email/templates-and-variables), or generate a fresh one with [AI email templates](/docs/email/ai-template-generator).

> **Coach variables fill from the first coach you pick**
>
> A template's **{{coach.first_name}}** resolves once, using the first recipient in your To list, so a greeting like *Hi Coach Reynolds* goes out to everyone on the email. When you're writing to several coaches at once, pick your template first, then edit the greeting to something that fits the whole staff.

## Send yourself a test first

Before it goes to the staff, you can send a test copy to yourself. Same subject and body, sent to the address you're logged in with. It's a good habit for checking how a template actually reads once your info is filled in.

## Save as a draft

Not ready to send? Save it as a draft. Drafts don't count against your sending limits, but the limits are checked again the moment you actually hit send, so a draft you saved yesterday could still bump into today's caps.

## What happens when you send

ProductiveRecruit checks, in order: your daily sending cap, your plan's email allowance, and that your email account is still connected and healthy. If everything clears, the email goes out through your connected Gmail or the platform's internal sending, depending on your setup. See [Deliverability & sending limits](/docs/email/deliverability-and-limits) for the specifics on caps.

If you have **"Include profile link in outgoing emails"** turned on, a tracked link to your profile is added below your signature automatically. No need to add it yourself in the template. Once the email is sent, it's logged on that program's page under the **Emails** tab and in its activity feed.

Your [target list](/docs/colleges/target-list) keeps up on its own too:

- If the school is already on your list at **Researching** or **To Contact**, it moves to **Initial Contact Sent**. Schools further along (In Contact, Campus Visit, Offered) stay where they are, so a follow-up never knocks a school backward.
- If the school isn't on your list yet, it's added automatically at **Initial Contact Sent**, because emailing a program is about as clear a signal of interest as it gets.
- Its last-contacted date updates, which is what the "Never contacted" and "In the last week" filters read from.

## What's next

- Understand your caps in [Deliverability & sending limits](/docs/email/deliverability-and-limits).
- Ready to reach many programs at once? See [Running an email campaign](/docs/email/campaigns).
- Build a template worth reusing in [Email templates & variables](/docs/email/templates-and-variables).

Source: https://productiverecruit.com/docs/email/send-a-single-email