Enter your idea

Good morning, finally some movement, and thank you to Kate and the Executive Office team for taking note of my email yesterday! Apprciate it. On the custom domain, I think we need to understand that basic / non-technical users might not want, or care, to use a custom domain and (for this) we should take inspiration from how shopify allow custom domains to be configured (see here https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/initial-setup/setup-your-email) - for some people they have the option to enter custom domain or subdomains and use those, and others they can just default to a unique (per store) subdomain of shopify.com.

In answer to your questions:
> Within your Xero account would you want multiple Users to be able to manage custom email domain settings, or just Administrators?
>> I think absolutely it should be Admin users only, nobody else should be able to change, and this should sit in the business settings.

> Does your domain have more than one mailbox associated with it?
>> I think with configuring CNAME records which can then manage the SPF and DKIM association, or allow to set directly - customers can then add a primary "sending" email address for notifications, and this would ordinarily perhaps be one of two - one for purchasing and one for sales, or the same "accounts" mailbox for both. The key here is NOT using the Xero.com domains as these get blocked.

> Would you want to use the same domain across more than one Xero organisation?
>> I think you could have groups of companies with a common corporate domain, so yes, BUT perhaps these could simply be handled with subdomains instead.

The most important thing I want to see here, as a cyber security company owner, is that we can use our own domain with this platform and be given the SPF and DKIM values so that we can achieve alignment with DMARC. This is basic stuff now.

Take inspiration from Proton - their platform has a very simple 'wizard' instructing domain owners how to correctly set the SPF and DKIM values. It even validates the DMARC settings. It's not difficult, really.

This is not for the single shop/sole traders using domains like gmail.com etc - and you ought to make that clear in the 'admin dashboard'. In fact, you could 'gate' the feature if the domain is from third party cloud providers, like ooutlook.com, etc, etc. You can be clever when you implement this feature to reduce user confusion.

Finally. Progress.

Within your Xero account would you want multiple Users to be able to manage custom email domain settings, or just Administrators?

Only admins.

Does your domain have more than one mailbox associated with it?

Here's the thing - if the domain is 'private', that is, not say a cloud service like gmail.com, yahoo.co.uk, etc, then it's a given those domains would have more than one mailbox. The domain owner would have control of those 'private' domains.

Would you want to use the same domain across more than one Xero organisation?

I would imagine the answer here is both yes for some and no for others.

Some stats on my LinkedIn post (https://lnkd.in/p/eYAUvrvy) as of 14:40UTC on 20 Oct:

- 3,862 impressions
- 36 reactions (likes etc)
- 33 comments
- 5 reposts
- 3 saves

but the reaction from Xero lives up to its homophone: a big fat ZERO.

Nothing here; nothing on LinkedIn; nothing to me personally.

Indeed and while many of my clients customers use Xero, all emails from Xero have very low likelihood of delivery as they have been blacklilsted too many times.
Xero dont have a clue, they keep on launching features that nobody asked for while ignoring key requirements.
Kelly Munro is a waste of space as has been seen. I would encourage EVERYONE to join on the post, and repost and comment and tag Xero in the hope that they finally start listening to some of their 5mn dissatisfied users: https://lnkd.in/p/eYAUvrvy

I am at the point where I believe that Xero either does not understand the issue, or does not know how to implement it.

The new AI-assisted credit control/quote acceptance stuff has been presented as a new feature this week. However, the documentation is totally silent on the email address that these chasers/quotes/invoice emails are coming from. Surely, as they were developing this new stuff they could have incorporated the email domain fix?

Xero apparently has 5 million business customers worldwide. This problem must be affecting the majority of those customers, so WHY is Xero not listening.

I'm looking at a list of 100 new XERO product updates...but still nothing on getting my quotes and invoices to my customers from my business email address. I appreciate that there are more AI features for me to turn off, and some amazing new rounded edges on the widgets. Truly insane that this keeps getting kicked down the road. Everyone else has figured this out...except Xero.

@Emma Collins - Your post has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the very serious problem being discussed. In fact - IT IS SPAM - Now - GO AWAY!!!

We also are struggling with this. Our Xero emails rarely reach Yahoo or AOL email accounts. Our client base can skew older so there are SO many who still use AOL, Bellsouth.net/AT&T (Yahoo), Yahoo, etc. We spend so much time following up on unpaid invoices because people never see the emails from Xero. WE have to try and expalin how to add the sender to theri contact list so MAYBE it'll arrive in the future.

Every other system in our stack that we use can send fully DKIM signed emails from our own domain. It's LONG past time for Xero to implement this and SSO.

Hi Edward,

That’s spot on, great work! This is exactly what we need. I’ve acknowledged and reposted!

EVERYONE: Please see Edward’s LinkedIn post link below and interact there to help build the noise! We need traction outside of here! Comment, repost and copy in Xero management.

Thanks All!

Following the suggestion from Jonathan and others that we raise awareness of this issue beyond Xero's forum, I've published a LinkedIn post highlighting this issue and the fact that we've now been waiting over 13 years for a solution.

My hope is that raising awareness outside this forum might encourage Xero to prioritise the issue and provide a meaningful update.

If this issue affects your business, please consider liking, commenting on or sharing the post. In particular, sharing your own experiences of blocked invoices or delayed payments would help demonstrate the real-world impact.

Here's the post: https://lnkd.in/p/eq9MBmC8

Hopefully, together we can get some movement on this!

Dear Xero.

What is it that you do not understand about this problem? Not being able to send invoices reliably, means that companies are not getting paid fort their goods and services. If a company does not get paid, it will go out of business!

Every other major accounting system supports sending emails from the customers own domain. Since emails sent from your system are now regarded as spam, because of the number of imitations being sent out, you need to fix it.

This was a problem caused by zero, so why are you expecting your customers to fix the problem by using third-party add-ons.

Totally agree Nigel, I'm finding nowadays that having any more customers on Xero is more of a liability than benefit.

The entire system is just backwards in many ways, and the management team and developers just don't give AF. This Kelly person is next to useless.

I am a Xero user and even I junk emails from message-service@post.xero.com!
The manual work-arounds I use to ensure my invoices / orders / quotes get through to customers are starting to become too onerous to consider keeping Xero as a serious option.

Class-action lawsuit?

Our invoices to clients in the financial sector (banks, mortgage brokers and others) are systematically blocked by their spam filters and firewalls. Every month, we have to send them manually - chasing payment becore 50% of they aren't received.

For an invoicing platform, that’s not a minor bug. It’s the core feature failing. Looks like the community manager is also failing - no update for 6 months now.

I agree with the previous comment: seeing a login page redesign while this issue has been open for over a decade feels like an insult to loyal users. Xero is polishing what already works and ignoring what’s broken.

Votes and polite requests clearly haven’t been enough. Maybe it’s time to make this visible beyond this forum? What do you all think? If anyone wants to put together a video or public write-up documenting the problem and how long it’s been ignored, I’m happy to contribute examples and testimony. We could also set up a simple website documenting the issue, so anyone searching for Xero invoice deliverability finds the real story.

I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but the lack of response from the Xero team leaves us little choice but to take another route - just so we are not ignored...

Xero team, @Kelly Munro : what is going on ???

This was first reported THIRTEEN years ago Xero, come on!! Everyone else is doing this, why cant you? Postmark / Shopify / Mailchimp etc they all allow you to specify a domain and then you have to add various keys to your DNS to get this to work. It looks much more professional as well.

Alternatively allow customers to configure a third party SMTP or mail relay service like Postmark.

I just spoke to a large US law firm that deals with one of my clients, and they block ALL Xero emails owing to the large number of phishing and nefarious actions and they are refusing to unblock it - therefore my client cannot send hundreds of documents of an accounting nature EACH MONTH to them through the system.

THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE BLOODY JOKE!!