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@hannah G

This capability is NOT complex to implement, pretty much everybody is doing it now - it is VERY VERY easy to setup. Please stop gaslighting us

FEBRUARY 2024 IS COMING

As previously mentioned, Google and Yahoo are intensifying security efforts, requiring all email senders to comply with domain authentication by February 2024. I have just received confirmation that other service providers have begun taking action on the upcoming changes.

We have a MailerLite account that we no longer use, but, importantly, we received an email regarding this matter, which I have attached below. Essentially, they state that we need to configure domain authentication; otherwise, our emails will not be delivered.

Xero, do you still believe it's a good idea to ignore this problem?

This is such a simple thing to do, that I am ASTOUNDED that Xero is taking this approach. The problem is, that IF Google WorkSpace, MS Outlook, Yahoo and OTHERS all start rejecting Xero's emails, then we will have no choice but to move accounting platforms. Moving Mail platforms will not work, as EVERYONE will follow Google and Microsoft's lead, as everyone wants more secure and scam-proof email.

Changing our Accounts System is not something that any of us necessarily WANT to do, but we will have no choice. We have to be CERTAIN that our invoice emails etc can actually be received by our clients. Like it or not, DKIM and DMARC are coming, and if Xero WILL NOT bend, and comply, then maybe it will FOLD.

It now seems clear that Xero either can't or won't do this. Suggest people make other plans. This is the same attitude which lead Blackberry to annihilate themselves, having once been the market leader, in fact, had created the whole product-category of 'smartphone'. Where are Blackberry now? or Kodak?

Hello XERO Community,
It appears XERO has decided not to be compliant with modern email messaging standards when sending emails on behalf of its customers; a customer with clients using Google systems (such as Google Workspace or Google Enterprise) it appears will be unable to receive emails from XERO commencing February 2024.

Another discussion thread with XERO shows the community is not satisfied with XERO's lack of development to support DKIM and DMARC authentication for all domains, noting the ability to "Vote" interest and "How important is this to you?" are now enabled, we encourage all to vote and speak up.
* https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/46571656-enable-dkim-to-reduce-sent-emails-from-being-flagg

Here is a good write-up on the evolving email-sending requirement that we found concerning Google's & Yarhoo's shift towards DKIM and DMARC authentication for all domains:
* https://www.valimail.com/blog/the-new-requirements-for-email-delivery-at-gmail/

And here are both Google's & Yahoo's pages on the announcements.
* https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/
* https://blog.postmaster.yahooinc.com/post/730172167494483968/more-secure-less-spam

Microsoft announced similar measures in July 2023 that have already taken effect, so clients with Office 365 will already be having issues receiving invoices from Xero.
* https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/announcing-new-dmarc-policy-handling-defaults-for-enhanced-email/ba-p/3878883

We hope the XERO team will reconsider; we want to keep our services with XERO. If we can not safely send Purchase Orders, Quotes, Invoices and other accounting-related services through XERO using our company email, we must consider alternative platforms to do our accounting.

In good faith :-)

Is there a way when sending email from Xero that the address has an identifier e.g
From: Joe Blog<messaging-service@post.xero.com>
Where Joe Blog Represents the company name and does not need to be @company-name.com.
This will allow us to filter when receiving emails to ensure we can manage phising issues. Myob an other accounting software seem to be able to do this when sending Purcahse orders.

If you've received a survey request from Xero recently, please make sure you highlight this issue when you fill it out. Your input is crucial in exerting pressure for positive change.

I'm also curious if anyone has any ideas on spreading awareness about this matter among a broader community of Xero users. There's a good chance that many of us are facing this issue, and by raising awareness, we can collectively put more pressure on Xero to make this change.

The biggest issue here is that emails go into spam, which is pretty bad when sending something so operationally important. The ability to add SMTP detail would be the perfect solution - or Xero need to work harder to stop their emails being caught by spam filters please.

The spam problem makes it impossible to use any email feature from within Xero, rendering those feature completely valueless, and increasing the admin time for our team.

Thank you for your input Denym. My thoughts are, whilst this is a work around, why would we pay $19 per month on top of the Xero subscription fee?
To be able to send emails from our own company address in Xero should be a standard feature and hopefully will be if we keep the pressure on.
For the time being, I will continue to email the documents to my company email and then on to my customer/supplier etc. from there.

While it doesn't sound like Xero will be implementing a feature like this in the short term, I wanted to add to this thread that Paidnice (https://paidnice.com/) has built this functionality that can solve this need for you (and it wont break the bank either from $19 a month)
- Fully customize sender details so emails like payment reminders, overdue notices, invoices etc appear from @yourcompany.com with your logo, colors and styling.
- Paidnice also attaches the PDF of the original invoice from Xero.
- Add a calendar invite as an attachment, for the invoice due date (including link to the original invoice)
- Automatically add late fees or interest, issued as a new invoice or added to the existing invoice line item.

Hopefully it helps! (Disclaimer: I built Paidnice)

We have implemented for our own internal use. (We built an application that connects through API). We can send invoices, statements and payment receipts from our company domain.

Would anyone be interested in this as a service bolted onto Xero?

Feature set envisioned:
- Send from multiple email accounts on the same domain (i.e., company.com)
- Send invoice
- Send statement
- Send invoice payment receipt (customer paid invoice)
- Send payment notice to vendor with line-item detail in CSV file of payment sent (works great for printed checks with more than 9 lines of detail on check stub)
- Optional email address verification service to minimize bounced messages
- We would tie into your email server/service via security configuration

Thoughts?

If you contact me, please let me know what you would consider a reasonable price for this service in US Dollars.
please contact me at za6kvwr8@duck.com (email address protected)

One wonders whether they've laid off all the staff at Xero who actually know how the underlying service works, and therefore how to improve it?

Well, you have just made a serious error of judgment in my opinion. Why? Because your emails regularly do not ARRIVE at the customer's inbox. They get marked as spam. This suggests Xero is not making efforts to get its email service accredited (DMARC etc). It is a shockingly bad rate of arrival. On one round of checking, 25% of customers did not receive their emails. Setting up SMTP is easy and most modern online services offer this. It is not "rather complex" and since most others offer this and Xero thinks it is rather complex suggests some modernisation is required in management thinking. For now, we have had to move away from email because of these problems.

This seems like a pretty poor excuse. As others have said, this is not a new technical idea, tons of other products do this. Set up the correct SPF and DKIM records and smtp services and you should be able to do it. To say it is too complicated is a pretty lame. If it is too complicated then why is everyone else able to do it?
Should be a standard option. Pretty disappointed that Xero can't handle this.

The decision not to implement own-domain sending is user hostile.

Xero's users have no control over the deliverability of their outgoing invoices and statements. Xero's outgoing mail ends up in customers' spam boxes.

I think Xero's product team underestimates the importance of email delivery when it comes to invoices.

This is not a problem unique to Xero, this happens with any SaaS that sends email on behalf of users, which is why there is almost always the option to use your own domain.

Here are a few examples:

* Delighted: https://delighted.com/email#:~:text=12.-,Use%20your%20own%20domain,-Send%20from%20your
* Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/182-sending-email-from-your-own-address
* Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/za/books/help/settings/emails.html
* Zendesk: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408832543770-Allowing-Zendesk-to-send-email-on-behalf-of-your-email-domain
* Quickbooks: https://www.hostdocket.com/set-up-email-service-in-quickbooks/
* Hubspot: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/domains-and-urls/connect-your-email-sending-domain

Please reconsider.

We don't even use Xero to create /send invoices, and this is one of the main reasons why, but I still agree this is a must-have option at the very least, for any professional service.

It's Not that complex and people that will use their own smtp server to send the invoices etc realise there could be an issue (but likely Less than with Xero attempting to send it, by the sounds of it).

I would urge Xero to seriously reconsider and get some of those things that we, the users, indicate that we need .. actually get done .. pronto.

I don't see the relevance of adding a logo Tim, it is entirely unrelated to the subject in hand

There is an option in the Invoice Settings screen to add a logo to each email template.

This is displayed at the top of the email. This option has been available for over 4 years.

That is very disappointing news. It's strange that you say it's a rather complex thing to do, given that Zoho support this in their free tier of their CRM.

For us, it's not too much of a hassle because we don't generate a huge amount of invoices and can afford to download them and email them ourselves manually.

Just to straighten things out for those who aren't sure of the practicalities of this problem. You should never send an invoice, or any other email from a third party server that doesn't have an SPF and DKIM integration. You should certainly never do so with your email address in the from or reply-to fields. That may be what Xero suggest but most corporate email servers will send emails like that straight to quarantine because they look like phishing attempts.

You shouldn't trust what Xero say about this, because by their own admission, they don't have the necessary expertise in this area to give advice.

There's a few understandably angry folks in the thread. My advice is if you can't live with downloading your invoices and mailing them manually, perhaps because your volume is too high. Then honestly, your best course of action is to switch to a competitor. As Hannah explained, email integration is outside of Xero's capabilities, so they're not going to implement it.

How is it that Xero can send us our invocie emails from there own domain but will not allow us - when we mentioned that, the inovices started appearing from message-service@post.xero.com

There are countless people here who work in IT and know it can be done,

There is countless other online / cloud based services that can get it done whose support it alot smaller than Xero

It therefore appears that the issue is one of advertising.

Not only are our clients not receiving emails, but when clients sent us a remiittance advice, we do not receive it.

We pay xero close to $100 a month, yet another smaller NZ company we pay $10 a month too can and does allow emails sent from our domain via them - therefore it is possible