At the moment it is only possible to have outbound emails from QF to clients coming from one email address. This is limiting as some would be much better coming from other addresses, e.g. for us:
Quotations from the person raising the quote (so enquiries from the client about the quote go back to the right person)
Invoices from a generic accounts address
Invoice reminders from a creditcontrol address (makes us look bigger than we are!)
etc etc
I think the way this could work is:
Have a default address, as you do now in QF
For each outbound email template (e.g.New Estimate Created, New Purchase Order Created etc) you have three settings for outbound email against that template 1) Use global default sender address from email settings, 2) Use a specified sender address which will always be used for that template and 3) Use the current logged in users email address
That way would give ultimate flexibility to cover everyone’s needs without breaking the current global setting (as the outbound email template setting for sender email would default to the global option).
I think this would really help us - what do others think?
Thank you for the suggestion, I will leave this thread open for others to add their vote.
My initial thoughts are that linking to the template may not suit all users. We have considered in the past sending from the email of the user currently logged in, which may differ from the global email address.
Also there are complexities around those users who have their own SMTP credentials saved in Quick File, we may need to device a way to store multiple SMTPs for different users. This probably wouldn’t be a simple implementation.
Hi Glenn, thanks for the reply and for allowing open consideration.
I can see your potential issues around SMTP. I know with our SMTP gateway you just need to be authenticated but the sender address can be anything@ourdomain.
I’m unsure if others would have the same implementation though and if not then you’d need to have individual user accounts settings for SMTP as you say (which I guess if not set use the global?).
We do exactly this for anyone without SMTP configured on their QF account. You can spoof any from address and it will send, although it’s much more likely to get blocked on the receiving end, particularly if the domain doesn’t resolve to the sender IP.
Getting the SMTP working for all setups (many require strict authentication) is not a simple task. Also you need ways of configuring the sender address for other different automated routines like recurring invoices, statements etc, where there isn’t a logged in user. Getting all this functioning correctly will not be trivial.
We’ll track interest here but to be honest it’s not likely to be something we can look at in the near to mid term.
I know our sales guy hates the idea that quotes come from a generic email address. So instead he generates a pdf from every quote and sends it manually from Outlook.
I think that’s a shame as QF would record that someone had opened the quote and they’d have access to the client portal which is great.
I appreciate that there is no easy solution to this one but it would be handy if there was.
Another option could to be allow multiple sender addresses if the user signs up with Amazon AWS Simple Email Service.
With SES you can authenticate a domain, and are allowed to send as any user at that domain, with both SPF and DKIM working to prevent e-mails ending up in a spam folder.
SES is fairly cheap - $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, though as QF is hosted on AWS, you will benefit from the non-expiring free tier, where the first 62,000 e-mails per month are free - you only pay $0.12 per GB of data sent.
I use SES as the custom SMTP server within QF (SES configured in the AWS EU - Ireland zome) and I’ve not yet had any charges for emails sent from QF thorough my SES subscription other than the data).
How the user handles replies to those addresses is up to him - using gmail for instance they can all be aliased to land in the same mailbox.