Important changes to FreeAgent emails

Roan Lavery
CEO, Co-founder

We’re making some important changes to how the emails you send from your FreeAgent account are handled in order to improve deliverability and security.

Changes in the 'From:' address for emails

In the next week or so, we’re going to change the way emails are sent by FreeAgent, in order to ensure these are still successfully delivered in the future.

Previously when you were sending emails (like invoices) from FreeAgent we’d set the 'From:' address as that of the user, so when it arrived in your customer’s inbox it looked like it was from your personal email address:

From: Nathan Barley <nathan@medianode.com>
Reply-To: Nathan Barley <nathan@medianode.com>
To: Colin Customer <colin@thecustomer.com>
Subject: Invoice for latest work

Unfortunately this is now no longer possible. Email servers (like those at Gmail and Yahoo) are changing the way they handle emails, and have more stringent checks to ensure that emails were actually sent by the person named in the 'From:' address. This means FreeAgent can no longer continue to send emails on behalf of customers like we used to.

Going forward the emails will appear as follows:

From: Nathan Barley <noreply@remailer.freeagentcentral.com>
Reply-To: Nathan Barley <nathan@medianode.com>
To: Colin Customer <colin@thecustomer.com>
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 noreply@remailer.freeagentcentral.com. The 'Reply-To:' address will, however, still be set to the user’s email so any replies to the emails will come straight to you.

We hope you won't be too inconvenienced by these changes, but they are necessary so we can continue to reliably send emails given the changing email security landscape.

***Update***

Thank you to everyone who has contacted us with their feedback. It's clear that this is something many of you feel strongly about, and it would be wrong to ignore that.

I've spoken with the team and we will be offering the option of sending emails from your own domain after SPF records have been added. We'll hold off on implementing the change until this new feature is in place in the next few weeks.

Verified sender emails

In happier news, we’ve released a new feature to help you better manage the email addresses you use to send emails.

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 your existing FreeAgent users, but you can add other emails too, which means you can send emails that reply to accounts@yourcompany.com without having to add them as a dummy user.

Once you add a new sender email address you’ll have to verify that this belongs to you by clicking the verification link in the email we send you. After that, you’re good to go.

Until next time,
Roan and the team at FreeAgent