which is great apart from it doesn’t give clear guidance what to do to achieve the improved reliability, I use a hotmail address, I believe the SMTP address is smtp.live.com, I enter that and try to save and get asked for an activation email which can’t be the same as the from but that’s the only email address I have so what now?
I would recommend against using a Hotmail address for SMTP, many of these free providers routinely change their SMTP policies and can easily block our attempts to send mail.
thanks for your reply, I’m going to thrash this one out with you as it’s one of the biggest issues I have with Quickfile.
I have invoices that have ended up in junk since the October update, there’s a usual pattern, I become aware that the customer hasn’t viewed their invoice, contact them, they find it and I end up giving credit terms of 3-4 weeks rather than 3-7 days.
Moving from hotmail is not going to happen, I’ve already moved to hotmail from a paid provider. Said paid providers of domains/and (one) email address for people like me are a waste of time and money for a poorer service, I’m mobile not office based and just end up forwarding these to a hotmail/gmail account to get the required mobile access and then there is too much tech admin to get replies etc working properly from phone or tablet, so it’s a complete non starter.
so what are my options?
Reading other support on this I understand that there are two ways of sending email, via your server (Amazon?) or via mine by reconfiguring the SMTP settings, is this right?
If using your server I saw something earlier that you advised should reduce failures:
Or do I just send all invoices to myself first ie cc them and then forward them? apart from being a pain will the customer get the online access if I do this?
Right now we’re sending mail via Amazon SES, and rather than spoof the “from address” (which is what we were doing before) we are setting your address in the reply-to header (Account Settings >> Routine Emails). So right now any mail sent via SES will pass SPF and DKIM checks, this should be more than enough to result in very high delivery rates. Also when the client hits reply it will come back to your email.
The recommendation in the post you mentioned was relevant before the transition to SES in October. What we are doing now by default is much better as we’re sending from a @quickfile.co.uk email but setting a customer reply address. So any reverse DNS check will pass and you’re still getting the client replies.
It should be noted that nothing you do will guarantee 100% deliverability. Email and SMTP is a complex subject and there are many rules implemented to combat spam, some of which will trigger false positives and most of which are not publicised and are based on proprietary algorithms. Just having an email with a certain word or string of words is enough to route it to junk.
For those cases where the emails are going to spam, your client’s email software may provide a reason but it’s likely to be quite general.
As for the SMTP error you’re seeing, a Google search indicates that it’s likely to be Hotmail blocking the attempt. The post there indicates how it can be white-listed.
So if my email address is correct in Routine emails page (which it is) just leave the settings alone and what Quickfile is doing should result in a better success rate?
BTW Get this if I try and go to the SMTP settings page now, what does that mean? Microsoft has sent a code to my Gmail account which is what I used when trying to change this earlier? or Quickfile has?
Leaving the settings as they are, in theory, will result in a higher delivery rate. Although, as my colleague @Glenn mentions above: [quote=“Glenn, post:4, topic:14525”]
nothing you do will guarantee 100% deliverability.
[/quote]
As for your screenshot, this is waiting for the code you used when trying to set up your own SMTP account. If you no longer want to use this, you can leave it as it is. If you do wish to use your own SMTP server, you can simply enter the code which was sent to your gmail account, and we’ll then route all emails from your account through there.
as it’s one of the biggest issues I have with Quickfile.
