Xero Mail - Send as @company-name.com not message-service@post.xero.com
Ability to make an email sent from Xero appear as @company-name.com instead of message-service@post.xero.com, when users send an email to their client/customer.
Purpose: To provide more validity when sending communications from Xero out to clients/customers and avoid items ending up in Spam/Junk mail.
Hi everyone, thank you for your thoughts and feedback to the idea here. We understand the interest and rationale for why you’d like to be able to send from your own company address when sending items from Xero.
This capability is something our product teams have reviewed multiple times, however being transparent with you all the road to developing a feature of this kind is rather complex and requires extra steps outside of Xero for customers to enable, and possibly impact delivery and spam control through the process. For the time being, this is not something that we have planned to develop.
To confirm how this currently works, when you send emails from your Xero organisation, these are are sent from our email message service. If your customer replies using ‘Reply to’ from the email they’ve received, their reply will go to the ‘reply-to’ email address that has been set up in your email settings - You can check and edit this where needed following our help here.
We appreciate this is not the news you’d like around this but do want to be upfront with you all here to help you make the best decisions as needed for your businesses.
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Tim Sneller commented
You can currently set your own reply-to address, as this is not checked by an email server when sending a message. Go to https://go.xero.com/Settings/Email/ to configure this. Then, when someone repies to an email, it does go to YOU and not to a black hole at Xero. BEWARE THOUGH, once you have set an email address and a NAME, it is difficult, if not impossible, to change the name on THAT email address - SO CHOOSE CAREFULLY...
I get that it is difficult to allow email to be sent out from Xero's system with what would effectively be a fake FROM email address, especially with increases in message security on many email servers around the world, to prevent spam. However, at the very least, as an interim measure, Xero need to allow us to specify an email address such as "company-name@post.xero.com.
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The proper solution would be to allow us to configure our own email service, address, and password within the Admin settings. Then emails would be sent out from our NORMAL email servers. Many smaller companies might not know how to set this up, so the current system could be the default, but ADVANCED users could add their own message service settings.However, if messages failed to be sent, it would be down to individual companies to fix it, probably without assistance of Xero support. HOWEVER, I have seen such options give the support company an excuse for email failing, and just blaming the user.
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Adam Henderson commented
Absolutely mental that this isn't possible.
Everyone marks @post.xero.com as spam.
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Christopher Dunham commented
We just had a response back from a client as to why an invoice of 15% of our years revenue was delayed, apparently it went to their junk. The bank overdraft fees on this one are significant.
Really weighing up whether we can continue with Xero without being able to send emails from our domain on automated invoices. It is a lot of hassle to move, but the alternative is starting to look worse...
Such a simple thing to fix...
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Dianne Graves commented
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.
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Jane Merry commented
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.......
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Richard Fincher commented
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?
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Dennis Murphy commented
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!
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Konstantin Ryabenko commented
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. -
Richard Fincher commented
Spotted on social media
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Perry Paolantonio commented
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.
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Lauren Christie commented
I have had a lot of client complaints about the email not coming from a company email address.
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James Leahy commented
This would be great. Will help our clients whitelist emails from us and setup their flows and processes.
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Perry Paolantonio commented
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.
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Niel Thiart commented
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 -
Konstantin Ryabenko commented
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. -
Christopher Dunham commented
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....
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Richard Fincher commented
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?
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Jane Merry commented
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. -
Perry Paolantonio commented
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.
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Christopher Dunham commented
Sure, I had assumed you could just download the pdf invoice and send it out anyway in your use case......