Within Clear Books, you can arrange for emails to be sent to your customers and suppliers with information about new invoices, quotes, purchase orders and statement balances.
By default emails are sent from a generic Clear Books email address with the Reply-To address set as your organisation address (which is entered on the Settings > Organisation > Details & Tax menu), Click here to find out more.
If you choose to send via your organisation email address, Clear Books emails are sent from our servers. We are considered to be a third party by email clients and this can lead to some mail systems rejecting delivery of our emails as they consider them to be spam. We have no control over the restrictions imposed.
To combat this, if you own your own domain you can adjust the SPF records, or if you use an email client, such as the ones listed below, you will need to configure the SMTP server.
hotmail.com, outlook.com, hotmail.co.uk, outlook.co.uk, live.com, live.co.uk, aol.com, aol.co.uk, yahoo.com, yahoo.co.uk, btinternet.com, gmail.com, googlemail.com & ymail.com
Configuring SPF Records
To ensure your emails are delivered you need to amend the records associated with your email address and mark Clear Books' servers as a legitimate source of emails marked as coming from your account. You can do this by including the following lines in your DNS record.
v=spf1 include:_spf.clearbooks.co.uk ~all
Important Warning: consult your IT account administrator as to how to integrate this into your existing record - don't overwrite your existing record entirely. Getting your record wrong can block all your emails.
We cannot give you a detailed guide to how to amend this record as the process depends on your domain name registrar. Some popular UK registrars have issued help guides for this process here: -
Changes made to your records may take up to 48 hours to propagate to all your contacts.
Configuring SMTP Server
If you would like to send emails directly via your own email address but don't own your own domain you can use the SMTP settings on the Home > Accounts menu. A quick internet search should be able to provide the specific SMTP settings of your email client (the screenshot below shows the SMTP details for Gmail).
Please be aware: Some email clients, for example Yahoo, will require you to allow third party apps to send emails via their server.
