Invoice email statuses

This article explains what the different invoice email statuses mean in FreeAgent.

When you send an invoice to a customer in FreeAgent, the invoice email will have a status of ‘Sent’, 'Delivered', ‘Bounced’ or ‘Blocked’.

You can view the status of an invoice email by navigating to the invoice and scrolling down to the Invoice Email History section.

Invoice email showing as delivered/sent but not received by the customer

If the email status is showing as ‘Delivered’ or ‘Sent’, this means that FreeAgent sent the email to your customer’s email address and didn’t receive an error message from their provider.

If your customer isn’t seeing the email, there are some troubleshooting steps they can take.

1. First, check whether your email has ended up in their spam folder. Most email providers tweak their spam detection regularly, and sometimes valid emails that used to get through the spam filters can be caught in error. 
   
   If your email is in their spam folder, your customer should be able to mark it as ‘Not Spam’ and mark the email address as trusted to ensure they receive future emails. 
   
   If your email isn’t in their spam folder, the next step is for them to check that the email hasn’t been set up to filter into another folder. Lots of people use filters to prevent certain emails from arriving in their primary inbox so if they have filters set up, your email may have been triaged to another folder automatically. They should be able to check this.
    
2. Finally, if the email hasn’t been recorded as spam or filtered to another folder, your customer will need to speak to their email provider to see why they’re not receiving the email.
   
   If you don’t have a custom email domain set up, the email address your customer should be asking about is ‘noreply@remail.freeagentcentral.com’ as this is the email address FreeAgent uses to send emails on your behalf. If you are on a free trial, the email address they should ask about is ‘noreply@post.freeagentmail.com’.
   
   Authorising FreeAgent to send emails from a custom domain might be something to consider if your customer still doesn’t receive the email.

Invoice email showing as bounced

If the email status is showing as ‘Bounced’, this means that the email has been rejected by the email host, for example, Gmail or Yahoo!. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as the target mailbox is full or the address isn’t known by the email host.

You have a couple of options:

1. Ask your customer to speak to their email provider to see why the email is being rejected. Once they’ve resolved the issue at their end, you can try to send the email again. 
   
   The email address your customer should be asking about is ‘noreply@remail.freeagentcentral.com’ as this is the email address FreeAgent uses to send emails on your behalf. If you are on a free trial, the email address your customer should be asking about is ‘noreply@post.freeagentmail.com’.
    
2. Alternatively, you can set up a custom email domain. If you do that then you can authorise FreeAgent to send emails from your custom domain instead of the FreeAgent email addresses.

Invoice email showing as blocked

If the email status is showing as ‘Blocked’, this means that the invoice email has been marked as ‘spam’ by the recipient’s email provider. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as the customer has marked the sending email address as spam or their email provider's existing spam filters have marked it as spam.

Most email providers tweak their spam detection regularly, and sometimes valid emails that used to get through the spam filters can be caught in error.

You have a couple of options:

1. Ask the customer to reinstate the sending email address. Once they’ve resolved the issue at their end, you’ll have to contact the FreeAgent support team directly using the blue Help button at the bottom right of the screen to ask them to unblock the email address. 
   
   The email address the customer should be looking to reinstate, and mark as safe, is ‘noreply@remail.freeagentcentral.com’ as this is the email address FreeAgent uses to send emails on your behalf. If you are on a free trial, the email address your customer should be asking about is ‘noreply@post.freeagentmail.com’.
    
2. Alternatively, you can set up a custom email domain. If you do that then you can authorise FreeAgent to send emails from your custom domain instead of the FreeAgent email addresses.