Getting started: your workspace, sender and first template

The five things to set up before your first campaign.

Your new workspace

The first time you open a brand-new workspace, Sumezi sends you to Onboarding instead of the regular Dashboard. This isn't a tour with fake data — the three stat tiles (subscribers, templates, sent campaigns) and the checklist below them read straight from your project's real tables, so they only tick over once you've actually done something, not once you've looked at a page.

Sumezi is multi-tenant: everything you do here — subscribers, templates, sends, the suppression list — belongs to this one workspace and is strictly isolated from any other workspace you or your team run. If you manage multiple brands or clients, each gets its own onboarding, its own checklist, and its own zero counters.

Name it, then connect a sender

Give the workspace a real name first — the quick field at the top of Onboarding (or Settings, Workspace) is what shows up in the sidebar and in your team's list of workspaces. It's cosmetic, but skipping it means everyone sees a placeholder for weeks.

Then go to Settings, Sender and fill in From name and From email — the identity recipients see in their inbox. That alone doesn't complete the onboarding checklist's "sender" step, though: the checklist checks whether Settings, SMTP has a saved host. Fill in the SMTP host, port, encryption (STARTTLS, SSL/TLS or none), username and password, then click Test connection before saving — a green status confirms Sumezi can actually reach your mail server.

Add your first subscribers

With a sender in place, the second checklist step is getting at least one person onto your list. You have three options — manually adding someone, importing a CSV, or embedding a public signup form — covered in full in Adding subscribers. For onboarding purposes, adding a single test subscriber (even yourself) is enough to tick the box.

Build a template

Step three is a template: open the Editor and save anything, even a near-empty draft — the checklist only checks that a row exists in your templates table, not that it's finished. Templates on the Dashboard show a status pill (draft, ready or sent), a category color dot, and the language flag you set for them, so it's worth giving your first one a real name and category rather than leaving it "Untitled."

Send your first campaign

The final step, Send a campaign, stays visibly locked (dimmed, no button) until the other three are done — Sumezi ties it to real data, not to which pages you've clicked through. Once sender, subscribers and a template are all in place, Compose unlocks: pick a template, choose recipients (all subscribed contacts or a specific list), write a subject and preheader, and send now or schedule it.

Compose also re-checks that a sender is configured before letting you send — if From name or From email is empty, it won't let a real campaign go out under a blank identity.

Troubleshooting

• "Send a campaign" won't unlock: it only reads real state — a saved SMTP host, at least one subscriber row, and at least one template row. Visiting those pages isn't enough; you have to actually save something in each.
• Onboarding keeps coming back after I clicked "Skip": Skip only sets a per-browser, per-workspace flag in local storage — it doesn't change any real data. Completing any single checklist item (one subscriber, one template, a saved SMTP host, or one send) permanently stops the redirect for that workspace, on any device.
• SMTP test fails: double-check port and encryption match your provider (587 with STARTTLS and 465 with SSL/TLS are the common pairs) — a mismatch is the most common cause of a failed test.