Invoices Sent with Wave Not Received
tarka33
Member Posts: 6
Has anyone else had an issue with their invoices not being received by clients? Last month I sent several invoices using Wave - as normal - and they weren't received. As I have to give them 30 days to pay, I didn't find out until my invoices were overdue and contacted the accounts teams involved. This is pretty critical for a small business like myself - particularly right before Christmas - and if it happens regularly, I may as well go back to using spreadsheets and sending them manually.
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Hi @tarka33! Thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry to hear that some of your invoices were not received by your clients. I understand this is a cause for concern. Is this happening to all of your customers, or just some? Usually if people are not receiving invoices from Wave, it is due to their email provider settings. Some email providers may automatically mark Wave emails as 'spam', or direct to their junk mail. Having your impacted customers add the 'waveapps.com' domain to their email whitelist usually helps to resolve this issue!
I'm having the same issue with using Wave invoices. Since December 21st 2019 the invoices aren't being sent to the client and my own copy isn't being sent to me. This is wierd and very annoying. The clients have always received the invoices and I've always received my copy by email to confirm it's been sent. I now have to download the invoice and then send a copy from gmail. This needs to be fixed otherwise I'm probably not going to use Wave anymore which is sad because it has been great.
I need technical support asap.
Wave Apps Software needs improving. Their server is identifying my email address as being sent to and fromits own server unexpectedly and not sending the messages through. After and year plus of using this app, it has decided to malfunction.
My Google Assistant has explained the problem to me and it is internally with WaveApps. To temporarily solve the issue I have been given an email extension to ensure that the email comes through. But this is still not how things were and it shouldn't be like that. Wave Apps was great besides this problem.
Hey @Larz
Looks like you were running into some server errors. Can you try resending and invoice now and seeing if it works? Reach out if you are still encountering this issue.
I am having the same problem. It is coming to me, but not to my customers.
Hey @Handydad! If you could DM me an example of a customer's email that claims they haven't received your invoices, I'd be happy to check this out for you.
Not sure if your team realises it but the tracking links being added by your email provider Postmark are over 120 characters (in fact they are over 300 characters). This is triggering the spam rule KAM_REALLYHUGEIMGSRC which is used on cPanel / spamassassin which is a hosting platform used by a LOT of websites and therefore email. This rule alone adds 1.1 points to the spam score of every invoice email and the default only needs 5 points to be triggered as spam, so you are always 20% behind before you even start to trigger other rules. You should be asking Postmark why they can't keep their link tracking img url under 120 characters, even AWS manages to do that or change to a different email provider.
Hey @John_Md, great catch! Thank you for that, this is really helpful actually. I'll make sure to flag this with my teams to see if there's anything we can change there. Cheers!
Yes this has caused a lot of problems until we worked out what was going on. Unfortunately PostMark don't seem very interested in fixing it up. Maybe if someone with a bit of size puts some pressure on them....
Part of the reason it would be significant is because you are sending emails about money you tend to get caught up in other spam rules so anything that unnecessarily lifts your spam score like the open tracking img url from PostMark is a bad thing. Its even worse if someones account with you is under a free email address like gmail because when you use the reply-to setting for email to enabling replying to a different email address than an email was sent from and that reply-to email is a free email, you get roughly 2.5 points added to your emails score as well under current spamassassin defaults. So if you add in another 1.1 from the PostMark issue you are getting very close to the default trigger score of 5 so it would only take a few other small rule triggers and your email is all of a sudden spam. There are lots of web hosting/email hosting accounts on cpanel and lots of those websites are left sitting at the default settings and none of this is in your control other than getting PostMark to fix up their open tracking img url!
@ConnorM
Has this been solved? I just signed up for the service and client invoices are being marked as spam. However, I get my copy to a Gmail account (not spam).
@ComnnorM continued....
are your SPF and DKIM settings configured properly? I was able to contact the host of one of my clients and they could not pinpoint an exact reason that it went to spam.
Hi there - personally, I haven't tried using Wave to send my invoices again. I can't risk my invoices not arriving, nor do I want to be chasing accounts just to find out if they've received them or wait even longer to get paid. Unfortunately, my days with Wave are numbered, which is a shame as I think the user interface is fantastic. That said, it's mainly because I need features that aren't available to businesses outside North America, but I still feel that this issue is a critical one for all businesses using their platform.
I know another Wave user who has had no issues sending invoices. I'll stick with it for now. But as a web developer and website host, I really don't want to ask clients to check their spam folder for my invoice. Embarrassing on many levels.
@BarsinA @EmmaP
Maybe Connor hasn't seen this question. Does someone else have insight?
Hey everyone. Thanks for your continued feedback and context here. This is something that has been recently escalated further, since we've noticed more and more reports of these types of issues, stemming from customers not receiving their invoices. We're taking a closer look, and will absolutely keep this thread updated as soon as we have some more information, and hopefully, a fix!
I just noticed that I have started having the same problem. Depending on the email recipient, some aren't receiving the mail at all. I too am a web host and it provider, including operating a few different email services, so I can dig pretty deep to try to see what happens, but in some cases the emails from WAVE simply disappear. I will continue to use Wave but I will also start downloading invoices and sending them from my own email address as attachments. I would like to be notified if something is being done to fix this
Hey there @stevegjacobs
I looked into our server and there doesn't seem to be any error that I can see here. My guess might be that depending on the client you're sending invoices to, they may have something preventing them from receiving invoices from our email mailer@waveapps.com which is the email which all our invoices send from.
I wonder if they may need to whitelist on their server as well? Or potentially some network security issues might be at play here?
@BarsinA
Would you want me to forward an email that went to my client's spam folder? Maybe there's some header info that might help? Also, was there anything to the comments from John_Md further up the thread? All my clients are using cPanel hosting.
Hey there @SouthernWebDev
I don't think forwarding their response to me would help as I do believe that according to John_Md's post, this might be an issue with Postmark and cPanel. Are your clients unable to mark the email mailer@waveapps.com as not spam or whitelist waveapps.com moving forward? I understand this is a bit of an ask especially for new clients, but I'm not sure that Postmark would be able to change their algorithm in this regard unfortunately.
Please don't hesitate to reach out with additional ways that this can be addressed.
Has this been fixed?
This has recently become an issue with clients on Office365 and Trend Micro or possibly Google spam filters. Never had an issue until maybe two months ago, now two different customers have had the issue. Fortunately my customers know when to expect my invoice and let me know if it is not received! We can't always count on being that lucky.
Perhaps Waveapps needs to review email formatting and policy, They may be running afoul of some new anti-spam requirement. Adding waveapps.com to a whitelist is not always easy to achieve in a larger organization.
I've seen replies about Wave escalating this and replies about it being the fault of Postmark and there's nothing to be done.
As far as I can see, the biggest issue is that the sending domain (waveapps.com) and the reply domain (your email addy in the invoice) are going to be different. That will usually contribute to an issue with spam filters. Add in Postmarks tracking img url (see John_Md's post above) and you're that much closer to being treated as spam.
At this point, I save the invoice as a pdf and attach it to my own email. I can't be worried about "did it or didn't it" with each transaction. The other bit I include in the email is the link to the invoice. That way, the client can click on it to pay by credit card. The link will update to show the invoice as "Paid." The client then has the option to save the "Paid" version as well.
A clunky workaround? Yes
Takes more time? Yes
Wish it worked better? Yes
Biggest issue in my life? No
Hi folks, are there any updates on this? I was under the impression that emails were sent 'from' my verified email address to my clients. As of today, I found out that it comes from an obscure 'wave app' address and goes into their spam folders... can anyone provide an update?
I too am noticing this and I just put my first client online. This is going to be a deal breaker for me as I am expecting thousands of clients and there will be no physical way that I can manually go through and email invoices. I will be switching soon if not resolved!
Hi,
I'm finding two issues with my emails...
Both of these issues are related to recurring invoices.
When I try to add a second email address to the customer to work around the issue, there is no option to do this either (I even disabled my ad-blocker, as mentioned in a different thread).
Does anyone know how I can fix this?
Thanks in advance,
I'm having this problem as well. Several invoices have not been received that are marked as being sent, some with reminders as well.