We regularly deal with Military groups and rely heavily on emailing our invoices. On several occasions now, the customer has been unable to open the mail presumably due to security/filter restrictions on the MOD system. Our invoices always have a PDF attachment with them when sent. Has anyone else experienced this sort of problem or know what could be causing it? We’d love to hear any suggestions of a way around this other than using gold old fashioned snail mail or cutting and pasting onto a word document. My feeling is that the MOD’s system is somehow screening it out as spam.
Anything with an attachment is always at risk of being quarantined, unfortunately there’s never any guarantees when it comes to email. What I would suggest is just emailing the link to the invoice (no attachments), this is how the system was always designed to work from the start.
The other thing you can do is use your own mail server, whenever we send mail from our server on your behalf there’s a chance it will get blocked. Take a look at the suggestions here:
http://help.quickfile.co.uk/main/1/improving_email_reliability.htm
If the end user at the MOD receives the email from you and can see the PDF attachment within it but then cannot open it, then it is not email filtering or the reverse DNS etc that Glenn has described (Although I would still use your own SMTP server anyway). If they don’t receive the email at all, or it is received but with no attachment then it is filtering etc.
If it is received but then wont open, it is probably due to either the version of Adobe PDF Reader on the end user’s PC being too old or a restriction in place to only allow signed PDF documents. The PDF invoice is generated by QuickFile using a 3rd party app and will only be supported by certain versions of Adobe PDF Reader although Glenn may know which ones I would guess at v8.0 and above possibly v9 to be safe.
The MOD are quite slow to update like a lot of large organisations and it is possible the end user is still on XP with v7 or something like that.
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The PDFs created on QuickFile don’t contain any advanced features (just flat text and images) and should be compatible with any Adobe Reader released in the last 4 years.
If the emails aren’t getting through I think either configuring your own SMTP server or setting up an SPF records is your best bet. I appreciate it can be a tricky if you’re not familiar with these things, but you can always send me a private message on here if you get stuck with anything, otherwise depending on your email host they may be able to help you out.
Amazing, thanks Glenn. I’ll test it out with them starting with invoice link only and see where that gets us and send pdf attachment separate using our own email client. I really appreciate your help
Great stuff Nick, thank you!!
No problem, let us know if you need any further assistance.
You’re welcome!
Do follow through the link that Glenn sent you though http://help.quickfile.co.uk/main/1/improving_email_reliability.htm as it is a good idea to set it up but for SPF records you’ll need to look at whoever hosts your domain name/DNS.
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