Enter your idea

"If Xero allowed us to effectively SPOOF the FROM address, many recipient email servers, such as Google, would mark it as SPAM, because the headers do not look correct. This might well be worse than the current situation."

this absolutely *would* be worse. About 30% of our invoices are filtered to spam as it is. Add in a spoofed reply-to or From address, and it gets worse.

What Xero needs to do here is not hard. It's a very simple thing to set up, and it's how it's done in, for example, Quickbooks. We used Quickbooks desktop for 20 years, and for the past 15 or so, we had all outgoing emails sent from our mail server.

That is not how it works at all Tim. Anybody can update their email domains "SPF" record to allow any server to send....

I believe that If the email message was actually sent using XERO's email server, then it should use an email address ending in @???.xero.com. In order to send from your own email address, it needs to be sent from your OWN email server/service. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to do this, but will require some development work from Xero. You would need to be able to configure your own email server's address, port, username and password. Xero could then send using YOUR server, and all the headers etc would be correct.

If Xero allowed us to effectively SPOOF the FROM address, many recipient email servers, such as Google, would mark it as SPAM, because the headers do not look correct. This might well be worse than the current situation.

Its not a "fake" email address.

As an IT provider nearly all of our clients use multiple systems to send from their email domain :) Its very normal and not hard to do at all.

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.

Absolutely mental that this isn't possible.

Everyone marks @post.xero.com as spam.

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...

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....