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Specify external mail server/relay
icecorp
Member Posts: 17
Hi
Are you going to implement the ability for users to specify their own SMTP server? This is a huge negative for Wave as mail gets stuck in spam filters and this will only get worse and worse as more malicious mail circulates, and also clients don't like seeing mail come from some long random Wave email address, I've literally had calls from clients saying I've been hacked because of this.
I think of it as a foundational feature that should be included. Can you share if you feel the same way or if there are/aren't plans to incorporate this? I think this would be a huge factor in retaining your own clients/Wave users and perhaps capturing those who turn away due to something like this (which is a major in my opinion).
Thank you!
7
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Hey @icecorp, that is a really good suggestion (especially given the points your raise) and I will pass this along to our Product Team. I know they are looking at different possibilities for mailing, and a number of our customers have requested at the very least additional controls and customizations for mail.
A possible workaround (for the time being) is to use Zapier, who we've recently partnered with, to integrate a third-party mailer service into Wave. You can take a look here! MailChimp and Gmail are the two largest supported mailer platforms.
Thank you! Trying it out now via Zapier and Mailchimp.
Hmm I can't quite see how to get Mailchimp to send the invoice to the sender instead of Wave, do you have a walkthru?
@icecorp Thanks for flagging this for us. It looks like the current functionality for the Zapier integration between Wave and Mailchimp supports the sharing invoicing and customer details between the softwares but not sending invoices through another platform. You've definitely raised some very valid points and Sam has escalated this type of a feature request to our Product Team.
In the meantime, for invoices that are caught in spam, other users have had success in ensuring that their clients have saved mailer@waveapps.com as a contact. The only other workaround at this time would be to export the invoices from Wave and use an external software, or manual process to complete the sending out the invoices, which I understand at times is not ideal.
Ahhhhhhhhh.......... ick!!!!!!!! I don't at all like that workaround, it adds loads more steps and time which is what we were trying to avoid by using Wave.
Please have this feature added as soon as possible! Can you give me an ETA? This is a major for us (and I'm sure most others??).
Thanks guys and girls!!!
I too would welcome a 'bring your own SMTP server' feature to be added for sending out invoices. Another potential workaround is to add your own SMTP server details to your personal GMail account, then use the Wave 'send via GMail' function. Remember to choose the alternative sender account from the GMail pull-down menu if you have not set it as the default sender in Gmail.
However it appears a problem with this approach is the PDF invoice is not attached to the email sent via GMail.
Hi @icecorp at this point, such feature is not on our roadmap for the foreseeable future, but will look to provide better customization of emails, better reliability of redelivery, and insights into when emails get stuck in SPAM filters.
Can you tell us what email servers are used by waveapps to send invoices? It appears you are using Google for waveapps.com. With this information, customers should be able to add waveapps mail servers to our SPF records. This would help with delivery. Has anyone tested adding google to their SPF record, and does it help?
We have completely stopped relying on Wave's mail features. Almost nobody gets the emails Wave sends out from the system, be it invoices or reminders. Everything ends up in the customers' spam folder.
This feature is much needed!
Hey @Russionix, we use Postmark for sending these emails, but I'm not sure about the actual servers being used. From my experience, asking your clients to whitelist mailer@waveapps.com in their inbox usually does the trick.
Besides the email going into the spam folder I also had an issue where the email was incorrect that I sent the invoice too. I had nothing telling me that the email could not be delivered. I am now emailing the invoice to myself & then forwarding the email to my client. That way I make sure that it delivers to them in there in box & if there is an issue with the email I am notified that it could not be delivered..
Hi @Oceanside . Thanks for letting us know about this issue you had as it provides context to the team when we look at how to build out our invoicing platform to make it more robust for our users.
Yes, definitely interested in this for the reasons others have described. I've had customers tell me that invoices and occasionally other emails are getting classed as spam, but I can't create an SPF record while the invoices are mailed from your server.
Has this issue been resolved?
I've just swapped all my accounts over from Xero and the very first invoice I sent in Wave went into my clients spam folder. As someone who provides IT services to those who aren't good with technology, asking my clients to add mailer@waveapps.com to their contacts is out of the question.
@lexicomnz We still don't have the capability of customizing where the invoicing email is sent from (it will still be mailer@waveapps.com for the time being). Our Sales Service team is exploring a few different options in terms of improvement right now (Customer Statements being one of them). If this is a feature that gets added, we will be sure to let our users know.
What's the point of repeat invoices to clients if they go into the ether?
The Zapier option isn't ideal as I don't always want to send an invoice if I'm printing it.
I don't understand what the issue is in implementing an option to allow wave to send via a defined SMTP server, it's a stock standard option in almost all web-based applications.
To everyone else in this thread, I've discovered adding waveapps.com to my domains SPF record has improved my invoices being delivered by a lot.
If anyone wants help with this, feel free to message me.
UPDATE: As @ben_29 pointed out below, this is not going to help. Not sure why I saw deliverability improve after doing this, but it wasn't related to SPF. Sorry, my mistake.
@leciomnz Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the community!
@Madbot I understand how it would be frustrating to continually ask users to whitelist waveapps.com. As an alternative, you could export the invoice as a PDF (under Sales > Invoices > More Actions) and then send the invoice outside of Wave. Another option would be to 'Get share link' (also under 'More Actions') and send the invoice outside of Wave that way.
@ckeen_1244 for manual invoices thats fine, but it doesn't work for recurring
> @leciomnz Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the community!
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> @Madbot I understand how it would be frustrating to continually ask users to whitelist waveapps.com. As an alternative, you could export the invoice as a PDF (under Sales > Invoices > More Actions) and then send the invoice outside of Wave. Another option would be to 'Get share link' (also under 'More Actions') and send the invoice outside of Wave that way.
Wouldn't a better option be to listen to the customers and implement a simple feature?
Along with fixing not being able to upload bank statements manually without running a VPN through the US...
Quite shocked at all of this and how long it's taken for still nothing to happen on either.
I'm curious about this, as at my end the invoices seem to get sent to clients by mailer@waveapps.com (as mentioned in the thread above) rather than over my own domain - even though the "From" field gets labelled with my company name. Have you found a way to get the emails sent by your own domain rather than by mailer@waveapps.com? That's the only reason I can see for needing to update the SPF records for our own domains?
Just for handy reference in the thread, I'm pasting the SPF record for waveapps.com here, which is valid and includes the Google mail servers:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:cmail1.com include:spf.mtasv.net include:4645450.spf02.hubspotemail.net ?all
No, but by adding waveapps.com to my SPF record, I'm basically saying to anyone receiving mail that "waveapps.com is allowed to send mail on behalf of lexicom.co.nz" if that makes sense.
So my SPF record is this: "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:waveapps.com ~all"
So Google is allowed to send mail for my domain, but waveapps.com is also allowed to send mail on my behalf.
This has improved deliverability for me, but it's not perfect. I'll list my results below:
Sent to G-Suite: 8 out of 10 delivered
Sent to Office 365 (Exchange online) 2 out of 3 delivered
Sent to Rackspace hosted email: 3 out of 4 delivered
1 that got sent to a random ISP hosted email went missing as well.
I'd like to follow this up by adding that I really do feel Waveapps is not only letting it's users down, but also itself. It's such a lovely piece of software let down in a massive way by a (seemingly) easily fixed problem.
Imagine you're a sole trader who has no idea about these things, I feel if you couldn't rely on your invoices being delivered, you'd very quickly lose faith in the software you were using, or worse, go out of business.
This is not an angry rant, as I'm fully aware that Wave is a free piece of software. However, I feel very let down, as I only discovered this major problem AFTER converting my entire accounting side of things to Wave.
Dear Wave, I'd also gladly pay a monthly fee to use an email add-on, but please provide a solution soon
To add to my previous comment, this is potentially a more widespread issue that Wave is not aware of as I'm sure the majority of it's user aren't aware of what's going on when their invoices aren't delivered. Here is a link to a reddit thread with someone having problems with emails sent from Waveapps.
https://reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6bf5uy/why_are_my_emails_going_into_spam_folder/
I understand how SPF records work and also the principle of what you're saying here, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'm actually observing at my end. Can we dig into the detail a little bit more here, just in the spirit of friendly discussion and clarity on the issue in this thread?
At my end, my recurring invoices give me the option to set the "Send from" field as an email on my own domain, which would be consistent with what you're saying in principle (i.e. we need to allow the Wave mail servers to send email on behalf of our own domains by specifying an include in our SPF records) - however if I tick the option to email a copy of the invoice to myself too, as a way of testing, what I observe is that the email still actually gets sent from mailer@waveapps.com, and the "Send from" email I specified only shows up in the Reply-To field:
Then when the email arrives at my end, it looks like this:
So what I'm seeing here is that it's the waveapps.com domain itself which appears to be sending the email - it's not the Wave mail server attempting to send the email on behalf of my own domain, and therefore I don't see how adding Wave servers to our own domains' SPF records could actually make a difference, even though you've noticed an improvement in delivery. It seems to me that the deliverability of the emails would depend on the SPF, DKIM etc for waveapps.com itself, not our own domains.
The other thing I'm curious about is that the "include:waveapps.com" syntax you experimented with seems slightly unusual to me (on the assumption of a scenario where Wave is actually sending email on behalf of our own domain rather than from mailer@waveapps.com itself) - I'd expect it to be in a slightly different format, perhaps something like "include:spf.waveapps.com" - in a similar way to how the SPF syntax for Google is "include:_spf.google.com" rather than "include:google.com", and similarly for Office 365 it's "include:spf.protection.outlook.com" rather than "include:outlook.com".
See what I mean? Just to reiterate, I don't mean this to come across in a confrontational way, I mean it in a friendly way and am just looking to understand if you and I are seeing different things happen.
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> I understand how SPF records work and also the principle of what you're saying here, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'm actually observing at my end. Can we dig into the detail a little bit more here, just in the spirit of friendly discussion and clarity on the issue in this thread?
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> At my end, my recurring invoices give me the option to set the "Send from" field as an email on my own domain, which would be consistent with what you're saying in principle (i.e. we need to allow the Wave mail servers to send email on behalf of our own domains by specifying an include in our SPF records) - however if I tick the option to email a copy of the invoice to myself too, as a way of testing, what I observe is that the email still actually gets sent from mailer@waveapps.com, and the "Send from" email I specified only shows up in the Reply-To field:
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> Then when the email arrives at my end, it looks like this:
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> So what I'm seeing here is that it's the waveapps.com domain itself which appears to be sending the email - it's not the Wave mail server attempting to send the email on behalf of my own domain, and therefore I don't see how adding Wave servers to our own domains' SPF records could actually make a difference, even though you've noticed an improvement in delivery. It seems to me that the deliverability of the emails would depend on the SPF, DKIM etc for waveapps.com itself, not our own domains.
>
> The other thing I'm curious about is that the "include:waveapps.com" syntax you experimented with seems slightly unusual to me (on the assumption of a scenario where Wave is actually sending email on behalf of our own domain rather than from mailer@waveapps.com itself) - I'd expect it to be in a slightly different format, perhaps something like "include:spf.waveapps.com" - in a similar way to how the SPF syntax for Google is "include:_spf.google.com" rather than "include:google.com", and similarly for Office 365 it's "include:spf.protection.outlook.com" rather than "include:outlook.com".
>
> See what I mean? Just to reiterate, I don't mean this to come across in a confrontational way, I mean it in a friendly way and am just looking to understand if you and I are seeing different things happen.
I work with SPF records constantly in my job and you're 100% correct. Wave are trying to make out they will send emails as your own domain, they don't, like you said all they do is fill in the reply address to be your own.
This is an extremely basic thing for them to implement, to be able to specify OUR OWN SMTP servers... But they obviously don't care enough to make it happen.
Similar to bank statement imports uploads not working from a lot of countries.. if you use a VPN and run through the US it works fine. If I use no VPN it fails. Do they care? Have they helped? No.
I am an actual idiot, and you are completely correct, I can't believe I didn't pick that up. I completely forgot reply-to and sent-from are seperate and the receiver will be doing the SPF lookup on the sent-from address, in this case mailer@waveapps.com, not the reply-to address.
In any case, we still need a proper solution to this problem.
I'm thinking about something along the lines of:
1. Send all invoices to internal email address
2. Use a secondary field (perhaps the message field) to specify the real email address
3. Use Zapier (or similar product) to monitor that internal email address
4. Match on all emails coming from "mailer@waveapps.com" with the string "Invoice .... " in the subject.
5. Grab the contents of the message along with the real email address from the message field
6. Use SMTP service of your choice (Sendgrid works well and is free for up to 100 emails a day, also has open and spam tracking, so you'll know if the email has been opened even if the invoice link hasn't been clicked) to send the invoice to the real email address.
Thoughts on this?
@ben_29 - I've messaged you with me email address, keen to work together to find a solution.
I agree that solving this problem needs to be a very high priority. I know at heart Wave is meant to be a simple solution for those who want to focus on their business rather than tech/accounting/back end details, which makes it imperative for those people to be able to trust that Wave does what it says it will do. When users can't rely on invoices reaching their clients this does a disservice to those people in particular, and frustrates those with more technical and/or accounting knowledge who see a need to get under the hood but can't.
I realize not every issue can be a priority, but this one should be. And I've mentioned in other threads that as a person with both accounting and tech experience I would gladly pay for a version of Wave that lets me access settings that are hidden from the average user (for good reason).
My two cents:
I guess we'll just wait and see. I would also like to take this moment to request the ability to accept votes for feature requests in a formal enhancement/feature tracking system so we can consolidate these requests a la UserVoice or FeatHub to name a couple I've used in the past. A forum-only approach makes duplication (and therefore voting) a lot harder for us users.
Is there any traction for this as a feature? I know Wave is free to use, but this is starting to negatively effect my business as more and more of my clients are not receiving my invoices, and are genuinely mortified to learn that they have invoices past 30 (or more) days overdue.
Feedback on mail failures would be nice, but just the ability to send email via my own SMTp account would be all we need to get past this issue.
I don't know what tech you are using to create Wave (nor should it matter) but there are SMTP libraries out there for everything these days. I write code like this all the time for my clients to send emails from their web applications.
Note: Please don't ask us to whitelist the mailer@waveapps.com email address it's a completely impractical solution for the majority of us.