When a client invites you to a job on Upwork, Lancer can detect that invitation the moment it arrives and respond immediately on your behalf — without you needing to check Upwork manually. To do this, Lancer uses email forwarding: your email provider forwards Upwork notification emails to Lancer as soon as they land in your inbox.

Lancer recognises both the standard Upwork invitation email and the newer Braze-powered "apply for free — no Connects needed" template (subject: Invitation to Interview for: …). Both formats are detected and handled automatically once forwarding is set up.

The setup wizard walks you through creating a filter — not a blanket forward. The filter has a single, narrow rule:

That's it. Every other email you receive — from clients, colleagues, newsletters, anyone — stays in your inbox, private and untouched. The upwork.com domain (without the @) covers both invitation emails (@upwork.com) and message-notification emails (@email.upwork.com) in a single rule.

Open Connected Accounts, find the bidder account you want to enable this for, and click Set up auto-invitations. The wizard takes about 1 minute and is the same across all supported providers:

Supported providers: Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, iCloud, Outlook.com, Proton, Zoho, and a generic "custom" path for other providers. Yahoo Mail requires a paid Yahoo Plus subscription for forwarding rules.

You'll see one of two completion screens:

Once forwarding is active, the bidder's Triggers settings page unlocks. To start auto-bidding, toggle on Auto-bid on Invitations, then pick a Knowledge base profile and write your cover letter template. A warning is shown until both are set.

The cover letter is a free-text template saved on the bidder account. By default, every word is sent exactly as written. To personalise a section per invitation, wrap it in {{ }} — Lancer generates that span for each invitation using the selected knowledge base profile and the invited job's title, description, and screening questions.

Examples of variable spans:

The AI fills only the {{ }} spans. It never adds extra sentences, greetings, or sign-offs, and it never rephrases or removes text outside the braces. If you write a cover letter with no {{ }} spans, it is sent exactly as typed — no AI call is made.

Previewing against recent invitations

Below the cover letter editor, click Preview on recent invitations to expand a test table showing up to 10 of this bidder's most recent invitations. Click Run preview to generate the cover letter for every row using your current (unsaved) draft — no need to save first. The result appears inline for each row; clicking a row opens the full lead sidebar for job context. Re-run as many times as you like while you refine the template.

The Attachments section on the Triggers page lets you upload files that Lancer includes with every invitation proposal this bidder sends. Choose Fixed (same files on every reply) or Smart (AI picks files per invited job). Switching between modes preserves files in both — nothing is deleted when you toggle.

Fixed mode — the same set of files attaches to every invitation reply, for example a standard portfolio PDF or capability deck. Up to 5 files, 25 MB each.

Smart mode — define up to 3 cases, each with a plain-language condition and its own files. For each invitation, AI reads the job's title, description, and screening questions and attaches only the files whose cases match. Up to 5 files per case, 25 MB each. At most 5 files total are uploaded on any single proposal — if multiple cases match and together exceed 5 files, only the first 5 (in case order) are sent. Cases with an empty condition are skipped.

Condition examples: "Client wants a Shopify or e-commerce store." · "Job mentions a mobile app (iOS/Android)." · "Client needs data engineering or ETL pipelines."

The Invitations table on your dashboard shows a status chip for every invitation, ordered newest first. Once auto-bidding is active, you'll see three states:

Both ⚡ Auto-sent and ✈ Sent chips link directly to the inbox conversation for that application, so you can read the proposal or reply to the client without leaving Lancer.

You can trigger a bid for any invitation that hasn't been sent yet directly from the lead drawer — no need to wait for the auto-bid queue. Click any row in the Invitations table to open the drawer; if the invitation is still unsent, a Bid now button appears at the bottom.

Bid now only appears when this bidder has the full auto-invitation setup — Auto-bid on Invitations toggled on, a cover letter template written, and a knowledge base profile selected under Connected Accounts → Triggers. Without all three, a bid can't generate a proposal and would fail partway through (after a browser session and a scrape), so the button is hidden entirely rather than let you queue a bid that's guaranteed to fail. Finish that setup first, then reopen the drawer.

Once set up, the button covers two cases:

While a bid is queued the button shows as disabled with a Bidding shortly label — this prevents double-sending. Once the worker finishes, the drawer refreshes automatically to show the updated status.