The Application Tracker That Fills Itself In

To track job applications automatically, take the chore out of your hands at both ends. In Aplyr, every application you submit through Quick Apply or Autopilot is logged the moment it's sent. On paid plans, a read-only email connection then watches for confirmations, interview invites, rejections and offers, and updates each application's status on its own. If you'd rather not connect Gmail, a dedicated Aplyr Inbox address does the same job. Here's how it works, and what it can and can't see.

01Why the spreadsheet always goes stale

Most people start with a spreadsheet with columns for company, role, date applied and status. It works for the first ten applications, then quietly falls apart.

A spreadsheet only knows what you tell it, and every status change in a job search arrives as an email, whether it's the confirmation, the assessment invite, the recruiter reply or the rejection. None of those update a cell on their own. Tracking becomes a second job you do after the applying, so it's the first thing you skip in a busy week.

Then the sheet starts to mislead you. Rows still say “Applied” three weeks after the rejection arrived, and you can't remember whether a row is the same role you saw reposted yesterday. If you're applying to ten or twenty roles a day, which is what Autopilot is for, nobody is updating anything by hand.

A different board or a fancier template changes how the tracker looks, but the data still lives in your inbox and you're still the one copying it across. Automatic tracking takes you out of that loop at submission time and again when replies arrive.

02Applications you send through Aplyr log themselves

Every application submitted through Quick Apply or Autopilot is recorded in the tracker when it's sent, with the company, role and date, and no manual entry. There's no separate step to forget.

That matters most for Autopilot, which can submit up to 20, 40 or 80 applications a day depending on your plan. You check a dashboard instead of your memory.

Each application has a timeline as well as a status. The submission, the confirmation email, the interview thread and any notes you add sit on one record, under a Timeline you can read in place. When a recruiter replies six weeks later, the context is already there, and you don't have to dig through your inbox to work out which role they mean.

03How the Gmail connection works

Connecting Gmail takes a few minutes and captures the part a spreadsheet never does, which is what happened after you applied. Aplyr watches for job-related email and classifies each message as an application confirmation, interview invite, recruiter outreach, rejection or offer. The message is matched to the right application and added to its timeline, and the status updates automatically.

The access is read-only. We can read job-related messages, but we never send, modify or delete anything, and we don't download attachments. Connecting Gmail is also optional, and the Aplyr Inbox below is the alternative.

Email only moves a status forward. A late “thanks for applying” confirmation that arrives after an interview invite won't drag the application backward, and an offer never drops back to Applied because a form email showed up out of order. You can change a status by hand at any time, though a later email can still move it forward from there.

A Gmail scan also reads back through your existing inbox and finds the applications you sent before you started using Aplyr, so the tracker doesn't start from zero mid-search. You review what it found and choose what to keep. Scans are capped at 5,000 (Lite), 10,000 (Pro) or 15,000 (Ultra) emails per month.

The nine statuses

Everything the tracker sees, from automated submissions to scanned email and imports, is mapped onto nine statuses.

The Needs follow-up view is separate from those statuses. It collects applications still at Applied after 14 days with no activity, so you can see where a nudge might help.

04Tracking without Gmail, using the Aplyr Inbox

If you'd rather keep Aplyr away from your personal email, every account can create an Aplyr Inbox, a dedicated address like your-name@inbox.aplyr.co set up just for you. On Free you can read replies tied to your applications. Automatic tracking and the full inbox view in Aplyr take a paid plan.

Use it as the contact email on your applications. When Aplyr submits on an employer's applicant tracking system, the confirmation and every follow-up from that employer land in your Aplyr Inbox, where they're classified and matched to the application exactly as Gmail messages would be.

It also keeps your job search out of your personal inbox. Confirmations, recruiter threads and job-board email collect in one place built for a tracker to read, and your own email stays yours. You can run both, with Gmail connected for history and the Aplyr Inbox for everything new.

On the Ultra plan, Smart Inbox adds AI summaries and priority flags, so the messages that need action from you sit above the rest.

05Bringing in the applications you already sent

A tracker that only knows about future applications isn't much use halfway through a search, so there are two ways to bring in your history. One is the Gmail scan described above. The other is Import. Your first import is free on any account, and paid plans can import as often as they like. Upload your existing spreadsheet or document (CSV, PDF or Word, up to 8MB) or paste a list, and Aplyr extracts the company, role, status, dates, location, URL and notes, mapping each entry onto the same nine statuses.

Nothing from a file or list is saved silently. You review every extracted application, correct anything the extraction got wrong and choose what to keep before a single row reaches your tracker. Anything that looks like a duplicate is flagged as already in your tracker. Imported applications then get the same email matching as everything else, so future replies keep updating them. You can also forward application emails to your Aplyr Inbox, and they file themselves.

06What we do with your email

Email access is sensitive, so here are the specifics.

• Access is read-only. The default connection is read-only IMAP using a Google app password you generate, which you can revoke from your Google account at any time. Google OAuth with the read-only scope is used for a limited set of accounts. Your Google account password is never shared with Aplyr.
• App passwords and OAuth tokens are encrypted with a managed key service before storage and decrypted in memory only at the moment of use. Everything travels over TLS.
• By default we keep only the classification result and the extracted fields, such as company, role, status and dates. Full message bodies aren't stored unless you turn on “Store message bodies” in Settings, and if you do, they're encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM.
• Classification uses a third-party language model operating under API terms that do not permit training on your data.
• Removing Gmail deletes the credential immediately, and you can turn classification off or remove stored bodies at any time.

We never sell user data and have no advertising business model.

To get started, connect Gmail or create your Aplyr Inbox, then import your spreadsheet or run a Gmail scan so the tracker begins with the applications you've already sent.

FAQFrequently asked questions