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This Xero Mail issue continues to be of critical importance to my business and it seems the same for many users - leading to lost communication, invoices astray, waste of time, and inefficiency - Can the Xero Team please respond with an immediate plan that reflects a solution.

This has been ongoing for nearly 10 years - it is a waste of everyone's time to pose an idea and then completely ignore the responses from customers. And yet I still feel I need to post in the hope something will change.......

I'm beginning to be reminded about Blackberry, at one time the worlds most dominant smartphone manufacturer. Questions had been raised for the first time about their product's security, and they just refused to even discuss them, even to the extent of one of their CEOs walking out of a media interview when questions were raised, rather than address what he felt was a hostile and stupid question. And where is Blackberry today? Or Kodak?

C'mon guys, this is a basic thing even for Startups to set up for their paying users, get onto Mailgun or Sendgrid and get this configured for your users!

I commented earlier that their marketing BS has nothing to do with the real functionality they provide.
I guess someone has to be scammed, lose tens of thousands, take Xero to court and prove it was their fault (because everyone's invoices are sent from the same address).
Perhaps after that Xero will take this issue seriously.

Spotted on social media

We switched to Xero a few weeks ago. Only sent out a half dozen invoices or so at this point, but so far half of them have been filtered to spam. Most of our customers are large institutions like universities and museums, and they tend to have pretty aggressive spam filtering setups. This needs to be fixed because if we're not getting our invoices to them, we're not getting paid.

I have had a lot of client complaints about the email not coming from a company email address.

This would be great. Will help our clients whitelist emails from us and setup their flows and processes.

Obviously the ideal solution here is to allow users to add their own email server settings. FWIW, Quickbooks desktop has done this for at least 12 years, probably longer. In the Send Forms preferences, you can specify common providers (gmail, yahoo, etc), but you can also set up your own email server. ours requires SSL and authentication. Your password is requested the first time you send an email in a session and remembered until you log out. See attached.

As far as the complexity, let people decide for themselves. We have used Quickbooks to email invoices for years and have SPF/DKIM configuration all dialed in with our web host, who also hosts our email server. It wasn't complicated or hard to set up at all.

My suggested solution to this:

Allow users to optionally enter SMTP server details, so that Xero then sends email via the user's SMTP server. This would allow users to use their existing SPF/DKIM configuration and take ownership of deliverability and the return path.

The only settings required would be: host, port, username, password, encryption method.

The user could set up SMTP using their preferred service, e.g:

https://www.mailgun.com/products/send/smtp/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/smtp-connect.html
https://postmarkapp.com/smtp-service
https://mailchimp.com/developer/transactional/docs/smtp-integration/
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/pop-imap-and-smtp-settings-8361e398-8af4-4e97-b147-6c6c4ac95353
https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl=en&article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fanswer%2F2956491%3Fhl%3Den&assistant_id=generic-unu&product_context=2956491&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a

Absolutely agree with Christopher. If someone can’t do it, they can hire IT pros. We setup this for Stripe without any issues and never contacted their support.
As for Xero competitors not doing any better, I believe QuickBooks allows to use gmail for sending invoices from your own email address. This is probably not the best way of doing it, but better then nothing.

At least give the choice! If companies cannot configure their SPF then that is their problem and it should not hold back the rest of us....

Dear Jane,

As part of the global war against spammers, all emails should be sent from a domain name with valid SPF and DKIM configured. Xero are sending from "post.xero.com" so that they can control the SPF and DKIM for the sending domain. if they allowed users to send from Xero's mail servers using their own domain name, they would have to provide a way that users could correctly configure their own domain names with the right SPF setting, and including the right DKIM public key, otherwise deliverability of outgoing emails would be worse than at present. Xero may be reluctant to do this because it might generate lots of unwanted tech support tickets from users who're struggling with this. There are ways they could do this in a manageable fashion, but it would require expert project planning. There appears to be a lack-of-will at Xero to even look at this. Perhaps because their competitors aren't doing any better in this respect?

We have had to resort to using the following text on all our quotes now because xero regularly autofills the reply-to email with its own! This must be a really bad advert for xero as it is read by all our customers.......
'When replying to this email please check the reply address is info@xxxxxx.co.uk Sometimes the email will autofill with messaging-service@post.xero.com. This email address is not monitored, xero do not notify us, and we will not receive it. If you place an order and do not hear back from us within 48hrs please get in touch as we may not have received your email.

Our clients pay online. When you send the email from Xero, the email is HTML formatted and includes buttons to the payment link and to a page where the client can view their past/overdue invoices. It also merges in stuff like the client name automatically. It looks nice.

Yes, we could do something similar manually but it's a lot of work per email compared to just clicking a button from the invoice page. I'm just suggesting that the same thing could be done from the Xero UI, to automatically fill out a new email, already formatted to match the template in Xero, with buttons and maybe a PDF attachment. It saves several steps and a bunch of copy/pasting/editing of boilerplate text that you'd have to keep handy, if you did it the way you describe.

Sure, I had assumed you could just download the pdf invoice and send it out anyway in your use case......

@Christopher Dunham: It may not work for your use case, but it would work for ours and many others. We invoice our customers individually. As I said, a workaround. I'd prefer that the emails just go through our server as well but this would be a quick and easy way for them to implement something that works for individual emails.

Perry - thats not going to work for any companies which automate their invoices. We rarely send out an invoice individually.

This issue is such a shame as other than this Xero is great, but its all for nothing if clients dont get the invoices

There is a relatively simple solution to this, or at least a workaround that doesn't require Xero to send the mail through your own SMTP server: All Xero needs to do is create a mailto link that pre-populates your local mail application. Here is a simple example: https://htmlf1.com/snippet/create-mailto-link-with-pre-populated-content

This is something that Quickbooks did for a long time and maybe still does. Basically it creates a new email with the To, CC, even BCC fields, the subject line, and the body pre-populated with the template text. Your default email program opens up with a new email already filled out and ready to send. I'm not sure if it's possible to attach a PDF to it, but it should work for online payment emails, and worst case, Xero could generate a PDF as part of the process so you can manually attach it.

As a bonus, this could also address the issue here: https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/45150577-contacts-allow-multiple-addresses-for-a-single-c