Hi there and welcome to Courted!

In this set of articles, you'll learn how to set up Courted on your device so that it functions optimally with your email & phone so that you can send outreach from Courted more seamlessly.

There are a lot of details to set-up that vary based on which browser you use, what device you have, and which email client you use. Included here are some common options. Feel free to skip to the section that's relevant to you!

Before diving into setup, it helps to understand what Courted is actually doing when you click a text or email button — and why setup is required at all. This section answers the questions we hear most often.

Not exactly — and understanding this is the key to setting everything up correctly.

Courted doesn't send messages on your behalf or from a Courted-owned number or email address. Instead, when you click a text or email link in Courted, it opens your phone's Messages app (or your email client) with a pre-drafted message ready to send. You're always the sender — from your own number and your own email address. This keeps your outreach personal and compliant.

These are standard web protocols — basically instructions your browser uses to hand off to an app on your device.

A mailto: link, when clicked, tells your browser "open the email app and start a new message to this email address." An smsto: link does the same thing for texting — it tells your computer "open the messaging app and start a new text to this number." Courted uses both of these to make outreach one-click. The setup steps in these articles are about making sure your browser and your device know which app to hand off to.

Your own. Courted opens your personal Messages app (via iPhone/Android sync to your computer) or your own Gmail/Outlook inbox. The email address Courted uses to open the draft is whatever email is set as your default — this doesn't have to match the login email you use for Courted itself. If you log into Courted with a work email but want outreach sent from your personal Gmail, just make sure Gmail is set as the default (the setup articles below explain how).

No. Phone Link (the Windows app) mirrors your actual phone — it's essentially a remote control for your existing Messages app. Your texts go out from your real mobile number, the same way they would if you picked up your phone.

Phone Link connects one phone to one PC at a time, using Bluetooth and your Microsoft account. It's designed for the person sitting at the computer to pair their own device. If you're managing outreach for a colleague, the practical workaround is to have them set up Phone Link on their own machine, or to send texts from their phone directly.

If you're managing email outreach on behalf of someone else, you would be able to configure your email set up, however, you'll need to have direct access to their inbox in order to get this set up.

For email, we recommend using Google Chrome as your browser and Gmail as your emailer, since that setup is the easiest.

Note that if this is not working on your setup, it may not be completely fixable – certain setups do not support Mailto: and Smsto: links very well. This is one of the reasons we recommend Chrome + Gmail, since it tends to be the most stable.

Yes — a few important ones to know about:

This usually means either (a) no default app has been set for that protocol on your computer, or (b) the default app was set but there's a conflict somewhere in your OS settings. The setup articles below walk through each scenario. The most common fix on Windows is to check your system-level "Default Apps" settings (separate from Chrome settings) and make sure Chrome and Gmail or Outlook are assigned as the MAILTO handler there.

Email setup:

Texting setup: