Gem requests a few key permissions as part of our email integration; Send, Read, and Delete permissions. The permissions are granted under a very boolean logic in that in order to access some functions of the permission set, we must request the entire permission, and then we mitigate the scope of that access through our own internal controls.
Send is fairly self explanatory. All the emails sent to candidates and potential candidates via the sequences created on Gem will come from the recruiters actual email address. Having the email come directly from them instead of from a third-party, like Gem sending those messages on your behalf, increases candidate engagement and response rates. To accomplish that, we need Send permission from each users email account.
Read is used to check for emails from candidates that are associated with a Gem sequence. We do this by first checking the sender’s email address for incoming emails to a Gem users inbox to see if it matches a candidate in your Gem account, and then checking the email thread ID in the metadata for that incoming email to match it against a known ID associated with a sequence sent via Gem. If both of those are true, we then use the Read permission to ingest the body of the email to include in the candidates activity tracker in Gem. For emails from a candidate that are in response to an outgoing sequence sent by Gem, we will store the contents of the email body. We don’t otherwise download or store any email body contents.
We use the Delete permission to enable our email analytics and reporting. All outbound sequence emails include a tracking pixel that allows us to tell a recruiter when their emails have been opened by the candidate or the candidate has engaged with linked content embedded in the email. Tracking pixels are widely used for this type of tracking, but they do have the downside of not knowing who is opening an email, so to prevent a false open being tracked whenever a recruiter opens their own sent emails, we Delete the actual email containing the tracking pixel from the sent mailbox of Gem users and replace it with an email that looks exactly the same, just without the tracking pixel.
This help center article is an additional reference: Email Permissions within Gem (Gmail)
You can also use this one-pager as part of a presales conversation.