Email sending

Send invoices, booking reminders and sign-up emails from your own address, so the people who receive them recognise who it is from.

What this is

By default, email your workspace sends to your customers goes out on a SoftSolz address. That works, but your customers have never heard of SoftSolz, so the mail looks unfamiliar and is more likely to be ignored or filed as spam.

Connect your own email provider once and every email your workspace sends to a customer goes out from your address instead, on your domain, with your name on it.

Which emails change

Anything going to someone outside your workspace, plus the emails Tasks sends to your own people:

• Invoicing - the invoice itself, payment reminders and receipts.
• Appointments - booking confirmations, reminders, reschedules, cancellations and waitlist offers.
• Customer Auth - the confirm-your-email and reset-your-password emails your own users receive.
• Newsletter - the confirm-your-subscription email.
• Forms - the automatic reply to whoever filled in your form.
• Workflows - email steps you have set up.
• Tasks - the emails your people get when work is given to them, when a deadline is close, and when their work is approved or sent back.
• Website Builder - anything the forms, sign-ups and bookings on your published site send.

Tasks is the one that also emails your own people, because the work is yours rather than ours. Until you have set up an address, nobody is emailed about a task - they still see it in the app and in their notifications. Alerts about a new form submission keep coming from SoftSolz.

Set up your address

The Email tab has three parts: Set up to add an address, Addresses to see the ones you have verified and choose which one sends, and Templates to change the wording your customers read.

1. Open Workspace settings → Email, on the Set up tab.
2. Pick your email provider from the list.
3. Paste the API key or login details it asks for.
4. Enter the address you want to send from, for example billing@yourcompany.com.
5. Add a sender name (what customers see) and optionally a reply-to address.
6. Click Verify and save. We check the details work before saving anything.
7. On the Addresses tab, click Send test to email yourself one and confirm it arrives looking right.

Choosing a provider

You need an account with an email provider. If you do not have one, Resend is the quickest to set up.

• Resend - simple, modern, generous free tier. Good default.
• SendGrid - widely used, good if you already have an account.
• Postmark - strong deliverability, popular for transactional email.
• SMTP - works with any mail host, including Mailgun, Zoho, Fastmail, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or your own mail server.
• Amazon SES - your own AWS account, so sending is billed to you directly.

Verifying your domain

Every provider requires you to prove you own the domain you send from, by adding some DNS records. You do this in your provider's own dashboard, not in SoftSolz.

1. In your provider, add the domain you want to send from, e.g. yourcompany.com.
2. Copy the DNS records they give you into your domain's DNS settings.
3. Wait for your provider to show the domain as verified. This is usually minutes, occasionally a few hours.
4. Come back to SoftSolz and save again.

Editing the wording

The Templates tab lists every email your customers receive. Click any one to change its subject line and wording. You can edit them before you have set up an address - they simply start going out once you have.

• Anything you have not touched uses our wording, so you only edit what you care about.
• The grey chips list the details you can drop in, like {{invoiceNumber}} or {{customerName}}. They are filled in when the email is actually sent.
• Preview shows exactly how it will look, with your logo and colours.
• Send test emails it to you.
• Reset to default puts our wording back.
• New template creates one of your own that you can send from a workflow.

More than one address

You can verify as many addresses as you like and switch between them whenever you want. Each one is listed on the Addresses tab; the one marked Sending is the address your customers see.

• Add address opens a blank form. Nothing you already saved is carried over, so switching provider in the dropdown is safe.
• A second address on a provider you have already set up needs nothing but the address - we reuse the key already saved for that provider. Paste a key only if you want to replace it.
• Each address is still checked against your provider when you save it, because it is the domain that has to be verified, not the key.
• Use for sending switches your customer email to another address. It takes effect immediately, and only one address sends at a time.
• Send test emails you from that specific address, so you can check a new one before switching to it.
• Remove the sending address and another verified one takes over automatically.

A different address per service

Every address has a Used for setting. Leave it on All services and it covers everything. Set it to one service and only that service sends from it - everything else keeps using your all-services address.

So a company can send invoices from billing@yourcompany.com, task emails from team@yourcompany.com and booking confirmations from bookings@yourcompany.com, all on the same verified domain and the same provider key.

• The services that can have their own address are the ones that email people: Invoicing, Appointments, Customer Auth, Forms, Newsletter, Workflows and Tasks.
• Each service keeps its own Sending choice, so switching the Tasks address does not touch the one everything else uses.
• Remove a service's address and that service falls back to your all-services one straight away.

This applies across all your websites and services. It is set once for the workspace, not per website.

When it stops working

If your provider starts rejecting messages, usually because a key was rotated or a domain lapsed, we hold those emails rather than sending them from an address your customers would not recognise. You get one email telling you what broke, and the Email tab shows Needs attention with the reason your provider gave.

1. Check the API key is still valid in your provider.
2. Check the sending domain is still verified there.
3. Paste a fresh key into Workspace settings → Email and save to re-verify.

Held messages go out once it is working again.