It’s one thing to send email but another thing to actually deliver email. Given the fact that more than 90% of all daily emails are spam, Email Service Providers are constantly changing their policies. A small deviation from the ESP rules can easily throw completely legitimate email into the spam folder.

As the email is core functionality in Invoicebus, we have to be on top of the game to ensure your emails always land in the right inbox.

In the past few years, many popular ESPs like Yahoo, Hotmail, and others, have imposed extra restrictions to lower the spam they get. New types of email authentication and verification like DMARC policies were set in place. These rules started to cause email deliverability issues in Invoicebus.

Problem

Few years ago, Invoicebus was sending emails on behalf of our customers by specifying their original email address in the “From” field. This was working well until many ESPs decided to adopt the DMARC policy. Simply put, DMARC policy doesn’t permit the address in the “From” field to be on a different domain than the sending server domain:

Example:

From: peter.griffin@yahoo.com
Reply-To: peter.griffin@yahoo.com
Server: invoicebus.com

To solve this, we implemented a small hack – instead of putting the customer’s original email address into the “From” field we specified a permanent email address registered under our domain (notifications@invoicebus.com). As the customer’s original email address was specified into the “Reply-To” field, all email replies would go to the right inbox without a problem.

Example:

From: notifications@invoicebus.com
Reply-To: peter.griffin@yahoo.com
Server: invoicebus.com

This was working quite well until we started receiving complaints from customers that some of their emails are mistakenly marked as spam.

The problem became even more serious when a few customers reported that their emails are not delivered at all. We weren’t sure what’s happening because Invoicebus was receiving delivery confirmations from the remote servers, yet the emails were somehow dropped by their internal mechanisms. After an exhaustive investigation, we found out that this was caused by a new spam rule introduced by the popular spam software SpamAssasin. The rule requires the addresses specified into the “From” and “Reply-To” field to be on the same domain as the sending server domain. Who would have thought? Just solved one problem another one appears.

Solution

There was no quick solution nor any possible workarounds to this. We had to completely migrate our email infrastructure and the way Invoicebus handles emails. This resulted in developing two new features for handling emails:

• dedicated Invoicebus mailbox for each customer (for example username@mail.invoicebus.com)
• optional setting that allows specifying custom SMTP server

1. Dedicated Invoicebus mailbox (default option)

Note: All customers will receive a dedicated Invoicebus mailbox automatically.

Invoicebus will generate a unique email address from your original address and set it as a default “from/reply-to” address for all outgoing emails you send. For example, if your login email is peter.griffin@yahoo.com your Invoicebus email will be peter.griffin@mail.invoicebus.com. The username before the @mail.invoicebus.com part is required, and you can change it to whatever you like (if available).

Example:

From: peter.griffin@mail.invoicebus.com
Reply-To: peter.griffin@mail.invoicebus.com
Server: mail.invoicebus.com

This ensures any messages sent via Invoicebus to pass even the most restrictive spam filters.

Your clients can also directly reply to any email you send. Invoicebus catches the replies and automatically forward them to your original email address. If the conversation relates to a document, the entire message thread will be saved under the document’s activity history as an incoming email (depends on the plan). This way you can keep all your important conversations in one central place (see image below).

2. Custom SMTP email server

Specifying a custom SMTP (depends on your plan) gives you the flexibility to send emails via your own email server/mailbox. This way your clients will get emails from your original email address (or address on your domain), rather than the one assigned by Invoicebus.

Please note that if you specify custom SMTP server, Invoicebus won’t be able to track any email events such as delivered, bounced and opened (“opened” is a new event that shows when an email is opened by the client. This is different from “document opened”, which fires only when an online document is opened).

Last but not least is the customization of your Display (From) Name, where you can specify the name your client sees when they get an email from you (see image below). If you leave this empty it will default to the last saved company name.

The new infrastructure should significantly improve the email deliverability. It should also give you a better insight of what’s going on with your emails almost in real-time. The easiest way to keep track of your emails is to take a look at the dashboard and see the status of each email, reminder, and thank-you note. Here’s a quick reference:

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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You’ve spilled blood, sweat and tears to deliver that project on time. Now it’s time to send an invoice and get your hard-earned money. It shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Unfortunately, we all experience situations with late payments, forgetful clients, and tons of awkward moments all the time. The business that seemed to be pleasant can easily turn into a dreaded task.

We worked couple of months to address some of these issues and I believe we have great news. Here’s what’s new:

• Invoice / quote scheduler (existing, improved feature) – helps you schedule your invoices / quotes for later sending;
• Automatic payment reminders – help you follow up on your unpaid invoices at regular intervals and get paid faster;
• Automatic thank-you note – lets you set personalized thank-you email that is sent automatically when full payment is received / recorded.

Beside the autopilot features, we’re rolling out few other improvements:

• Improved dashboard – shows better overview of your outgoing emails with one glance.
• Export functionality – lets you download your invoice/quote list to xml, csv, or excel file so you can make custom reports.
• Functionality that allows you to enter custom date when you record a payment.

You can learn more on these updates below.

Automatic payment reminders

This feature should have been ready couple of months ago, but we reworked it couple of times since we weren’t exactly sure how we would like it to work. Even though this might seem like a simple functionality it turned out to be real pain in the neck. No matter what we tried, the user experience never felt right. We wanted flexibility, on the other hand flexible meant more checkboxes, more prompts, and more distraction.

After tons of trade-offs we came up with something that we believe is quite simple and instantly intuitive.

We added an option to set automatic payment reminders on-the-fly, directly from the invoice editor. This way your workflow and focus will be preserved, and you’ll never forget to set your reminders up (even if you forget, you can still schedule them later from the main menu).

You can set up to 3 different reminders per invoice at a time. This way you can gradually change the tone of your language depending on the situation. You can also save default template for each reminder and re-use it for all future invoices without hassle.

Implementing automatic payment reminders pulled few other changes throughout the system. We had to change the way you schedule your emails, plus we had to add few extra indicators to the dashboard.

Automatic thank you notes

We do forget to say thanks. And we repeat this mistake quite often. Sometimes due to some burden of work, and sometimes due our own negligence. And this could be a real turn-off in building successful relationships.

That’s why we decided to completely automate the “thanks note” task. That means, as soon as you get paid Invoicebus will automatically send personalized thank-you email to your client, signed with your name and email address. As your client will not be aware that this is an automated thank-you, you will always look super professional and grateful.

Even if you don’t accept online payments, you can still set an automatic thanks note which will be sent immediately after you record a payment.

Improved dashboard

Thousands of emails get lost in the cyberspace every day. If this happens, the intended recipient will never get the message and many times you both won’t be aware that the email was lost.

By tracking all outgoing emails, Invoicebus makes sure this never happens.

Now we improved the dashboard by including few extra indicators that will help you track every outgoing email with one glance. This will also give you a better overview of all sent/scheduled reminders as well as thanks notes.

Each email can hold one of the following statuses:

• Scheduled – email will be sent automatically when conditions are met
• Sent – email was sent to the recipient’s email service provider
• Delivered – email was accepted by the recipient’s email service provider and was delivered to the recipient’s mailbox
• Opened – client opened your online invoice / quote by clicking the link
• Not delivered – email was not delivered

Export to XML, CSV, or Excel

Excel is a great tool which we enjoy using for creating custom reports and data charts. Even though Export-to-Excel functionality was planned for later on, we decided to push it into this update and we’re glad we did.

This feature is exciting because it lets you filter your invoice/quote list and download the result set into 3 different file formats: xml, csv, and xls. The output data is beautifully formatted so you don’t need to struggle with extra formatting later on. Then you can directly print it out, or make custom reports according to your needs.

Even if you don’t have Excel, you can open the csv file with any text editor or spreadsheet program.

Now it’s your turn!

Is there anything we can do to make Invoicebus better? Feel free to give me a shout in the comments below.

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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