Owlat Docs

Welcome to Owlat

Set up your Owlat workspace and send your first email — from deploying the stack to verifying a domain, building your audience, and launching a campaign.

Owlat is an email platform for teams that need to send marketing campaigns, transactional emails, and automated workflows — all from one place. This guide walks you through setting up your workspace and sending your first email.

Every Owlat install today is self-hosted

Owlat is currently self-hosted only — you run it on your own VPS. A managed hosted cloud is on the roadmap; join the waitlist to be notified at launch. If you already have an Owlat instance set up, skip to step 1 below.

0. Deploy Owlat

On a fresh Linux VPS with Docker + Docker Compose v2 installed, one command is enough:

curl -fsSL https://get.owlat.app | bash

The interactive wizard asks for your sending domain (EHLO hostname and bounce/Return-Path domain), your email sending provider (built-in MTA, Resend, or SES), AI provider keys, and an admin account, then writes your config. DKIM keys are generated for you; you add the resulting DNS records afterward. The full deployment guide lives at Self-Hosting.

Once your instance is up, open it in a browser and continue below.

What you can do with Owlat

  • Build beautiful emails with a visual, block-based editor that renders consistently across every email client
  • Manage your audience with contacts, topics, segments, and custom properties
  • Send campaigns with reporting, A/B testing, and scheduling
  • Automate workflows with trigger-based automations that run on their own
  • Send transactional emails like password resets and order confirmations through the API
  • Protect your sender reputation with domain verification, blocklist management, and compliance controls
Onboarding checklist

When you first log in, the dashboard includes an onboarding checklist that tracks your setup progress — domain verification, first template, first campaign, and more. Follow it for a guided path to your first send.

1. Set up your workspace

Each Owlat deployment hosts exactly one organization, which is provisioned during deploy — you don't create it yourself.

  1. Sign in with the admin account you created during the setup wizard (owlat quickstart).
  2. Open Settings > Organization to confirm your organization details.
  3. Invite your team from Settings > Organization > Team Members and assign roles.

2. Verify a sending domain

Only if you send marketing or transactional email

Verifying a domain and configuring a delivery provider applies when you send campaigns, transactional, or automations. If you only want to read mail from an external mailbox over IMAP (and reply 1:1 through your own SMTP), you can skip this — see Operating Modes for the full picture.

Before you can send marketing or transactional email, you need to verify that you own your sending domain.

  1. Go to Settings > Technical > Sending Domains.
  2. Add your sending domain.
  3. Add the required DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to your DNS provider.
  4. Click Verify and wait for confirmation.

See Deliverability for a detailed walkthrough and explanation of each DNS record.

3. Build your audience

  1. Go to Audience > Contacts and import your contacts via CSV or create them manually.
  2. Create Topics to organize your audience into targetable groups.
  3. Define Contact Properties in Settings > Properties for custom data fields.
  4. Build Segments to create dynamic, rule-based audience groups.
  5. Set up Forms to capture new signups from your website.

4. Build your email assets

  1. Set up your Email Theme in Settings > Organization > Email Theme for consistent branding.
  2. Create marketing templates in Mail > Marketing using the Email Editor.
  3. Save reusable sections as Saved Blocks in Mail > Blocks.
  4. Create transactional templates in Mail > Transactional for API-triggered emails.
  5. Add Translations for multi-language audiences.

5. Send your first campaign

  1. Open Campaigns > All Campaigns and click New Campaign.
  2. Setup — name your campaign, set the sender (from name and from address), and choose a single topic or a single segment. Optionally open Add an A/B test to set up a subject- or content-based test.
  3. Content — write your subject line and pick the template to send.
  4. Review — confirm the details, then send now or schedule for later.

See Campaigns & Reporting for a detailed walkthrough and A/B Testing to optimize your sends.

6. Set up automations

  1. Go to Automations and create a new automation.
  2. Configure a trigger (new contact, contact updated, custom event, topic subscription).
  3. Add steps: send email, wait, branch on conditions.
  4. Activate and monitor.

See Automations for common patterns and a full building guide.

7. Connect your application

Integrate Owlat with your product to sync contacts, send transactional emails, and track custom events. Create an API key in Settings > Technical > API Keys and check the API documentation for endpoints and SDK options.

Set up Webhooks to receive real-time notifications about delivery events, engagement, and more.

Next steps

Next Contact Properties