Bulk send, rebuilt for thousands of recipients

Bulk send has existed in SignTheDoc for years, and for years it had a quiet ceiling. Past a few hundred recipients things got slow, status tracking became a wall of undifferentiated rows, and a single bad email address could leave you unsure whether the batch had actually finished.

We rebuilt it. The new bulk send handles batches of up to fifty thousand recipients, prefills fields per person, and gives you a status view that answers the only question that matters: who still has not signed?

Prefill from a spreadsheet

Upload a CSV where each row is a recipient. Map columns to fields once, and every generated document arrives personalised — name, employee number, department, start date, whatever your document needs.

Prefilled fields can be locked or editable. A locked field displays the value but cannot be changed by the signer, which is what you want for an employee ID. An editable prefill is a starting point the signer can correct, which is what you want for a mailing address.

Every copy is genuinely separate

This is the part people most often misunderstand. A bulk send is not one document with many signers. It generates an independent envelope per recipient, each with its own audit trail, its own completion certificate, and its own retention lifecycle.

No recipient can see that others received the same document. No recipient appears in anyone else’s audit trail. If you need to void one person’s copy, it has no effect on the other forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.

Status that scales

The batch view groups by state rather than listing every recipient. You see counts for sent, viewed, in progress, completed, bounced, and declined, and you drill into any group. The default sort inside a group is by how long the document has been sitting there, because the person who received it eleven days ago is the one who needs a nudge.

Bounced addresses are separated out immediately rather than being counted as pending. A batch where forty recipients never received the email is a very different situation from one where forty are ignoring you, and the old view made those look identical.

Reminders and expiry per batch

• Set a reminder cadence once and it applies to every outstanding recipient individually, timed from their own send date
• Expiry can be a fixed calendar date or a rolling window per recipient
• Resend to just the bounced group after correcting addresses, without regenerating the whole batch
• Stop the entire batch mid-flight; completed documents stay completed, everything outstanding is voided

Throughput and rate limits

Generation runs asynchronously. A fifty-thousand-recipient batch is queued and processed in the background, typically completing generation within a few minutes. Email delivery is deliberately paced to protect sender reputation — blasting fifty thousand messages in ten seconds is an excellent way to end up in spam folders.

You can start using the status view as soon as generation begins. There is no need to wait for the whole batch before the first recipients start signing.

Deliverability is the real constraint

The technical limit on a large batch is rarely our generation capacity. It is whether the receiving mail providers accept the volume, and that is governed by sender reputation rather than by anything either of us can configure directly.

For batches above a few thousand, verify your address list first. A list with a high proportion of invalid addresses generates bounces, bounces damage reputation, and damaged reputation causes the valid addresses to start landing in spam. One bad batch can degrade delivery for weeks afterwards.

Correcting a batch after it has gone

Mistakes at this scale are stressful, so the recovery paths are worth knowing before you need them.

• Void the whole batch — outstanding documents become invalid, completed ones are untouched
• Void a subset by filter, for example everyone in a particular department
• Correct and resend to the bounced group without regenerating anything else
• Send a follow-up notice to the batch without voiding, where the error is cosmetic

What you cannot do is edit a document that has already been sent. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a missing feature — a system where the sender can alter a document after a recipient has seen it produces an audit trail nobody should rely on.

Where bulk send is the wrong tool

If every recipient needs to sign the same physical document — a board resolution, a multi-party settlement — you want a single envelope with multiple signers, not a bulk send. Bulk send is for the case where each person gets their own agreement that happens to share a template.

Bulk send is available on Business plans and above. It is one of the few features we gate, mostly because supporting a fifty-thousand-recipient batch is genuinely expensive on our side.