Changes to the From: address for emails

In the next week or so, FreeAgent are going to change the way emails are sent, in order to ensure they continue to be successfully delivered in the future.

Email servers (like those at Gmail and Yahoo) are changing the way they handle emails, and introducing more stringent checks to ensure that emails are actually sent by the person named in the From: address.

Previously when you were sending emails (such as invoices) from FreeAgent, the From: address would be set to your own, so when it arrived in a customer’s inbox it looked like it was from your own email address:

From: Nathan Barley <[email protected]>

Reply-To: [email protected]

To: Colin Customer <[email protected]>

Subject: Invoice for latest work

Once the changes are rolled out emails will appear as follows:

From: Nathan Barley <[email protected]>

Reply-To: [email protected]

To: Colin Customer <[email protected]>

Subject: Invoice for latest work

As you can see, the name of the sender will be the same as before, but the From: address will now be set to [email protected]. The Reply-To address will however still be set to the user’s email so any replies will come straight to you.

We hope you won’t be too inconvenienced by these changes. These changes are necessary so FreeAgent can continue to reliably send emails given the changing email security landscape.

Verified sender emails

In other news, FreeAgent are releasing a new feature to help you better manage the email addresses you use to send emails in FreeAgent.

In the Settings area you’ll find a new Verified Sender Emails section, which lists all email addresses that you can send emails from. This will be populated with the email addresses of existing FreeAgent users, but you can add other emails too, which means you can send emails that reply-to [email protected].

Once a new email address is added, FreeAgent need to verify that this belongs to you via a verification email sent to you.