Sending an invoice is the easy part. Making sure the reply reaches a human is the bit that quietly fails: a customer replies to the wrong address, or their mail client ignores what you asked it to do, and the message goes nowhere at all.
Here’s how sending is set up, and what catches the mail that would otherwise be lost.
What you can do
- Send documents by email with your own template, signature and default recipients.
- Have replies come straight back to your own address, the ordinary way.
- Read the in-app mailbox that catches messages sent to the address the system sends from.
- Search and sort both what came in and what went out, and export the list.
- Mark a message done, or throw it away.
- Configure your own mail server so mail leaves as your domain.
- Keep named sender addresses for different purposes.
- Set default CC and BCC on document emails, so your own records copy themselves.
- Design the email templates documents are sent with.
How it works in practice
Send from the document (the document → Send). Your template, your signature, your customer’s language, and a PDF or a payment link attached. Anyone you always want copied can be set as a default CC or BCC rather than remembered each time.
Replies come to you directly. Every document email carries your company’s own reply-to address, so when a customer hits Reply in Outlook the message goes to your inbox, not into an app somebody has to remember to open. That’s the intended path and the one to rely on.
The mailbox is the safety net (Mailbox). Some mail doesn’t follow that path: a customer who writes to the sending address instead of replying, a mail client that strips the reply-to, an address copied off a printed PDF, a thread forwarded from somewhere else. Because the system sends from an address it owns, those messages have somewhere to land instead of bouncing into nothing, and that somewhere is here. There’s a sent view alongside it for what went out.
Work through it like any other list. Sort by sender, subject or date, search it, page through it, export it. Mark a message done when it’s been dealt with, or bin it.
An empty mailbox is normal. It isn’t a shared inbox and it isn’t where your customer conversations are meant to live. Judge it by whether anything got lost, not by how much is in it.
Send as your own domain when you’re ready (Settings → Email). Configure your own mail server and named sender addresses, and outbound mail leaves as you rather than as the system’s default address. For anything you send in volume - statements, reminders, a mailing - do this, because recipients’ spam filters care a great deal about who a message claims to be from.
Good to know
- Out of the box, mail sends from an address the system owns, not from yours. Sending as your own domain needs the DNS records that authorize it, which is why it’s a deliberate setup step rather than a text box for your address. Sending as a domain you haven’t authorized is exactly what spam filters exist to catch.
- Configure your own sender before your first mailing, not after. Deliverability problems are much easier to avoid than to repair. See contact history and mailings.
- The mailbox is per company. Messages land against the company that sent the document.
- It’s a net, not an inbox. There’s no threading, no assignment and no shared triage. If a message needs a real conversation, reply from your own mail client where the history lives.
- Deleting a message removes it from your view, not from the world. The customer still has what they sent, and your own mail server still has whatever it received.