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Email

What this is for​

Email is the channel every plan has, and the one everything else falls back to. Get it working properly once and most of your notifications look after themselves.

Setting it up​

Under Settings › Email, configure your mail provider: the host, port, encryption, username, password, and the from address and name that appears on messages.

This is the kind of setup worth doing once, carefully, with whoever manages your domain.

Choosing a from address​

Use a real address at your own domain — hello@yourrestaurant.com, not a personal Gmail and not noreply@.

Three reasons, in order of how much they'll cost you:

  1. Deliverability. Mail sent from your domain, properly configured, reaches inboxes. Mail that claims to be from a domain it isn't authorised for goes to spam.
  2. Replies. Guests reply to confirmations. noreply@ throws those away, and some of them are people trying to change a booking.
  3. Trust. A confirmation from an address that matches your website looks like you.

Making mail arrive​

The single most common problem with restaurant email isn't configuration — it's spam folders.

Ask whoever manages your domain to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. They're DNS entries that tell the world your mail server is allowed to send as you. Without them, confirmations and OTPs land in spam and you'll never know.

This is a half-hour job for someone technical and it's the difference between email working and email appearing to work.

Testing it​

After any change:

  1. Send a test to an address outside your own domain — a Gmail or Outlook account. Internal mail often works when external mail doesn't.
  2. Check it arrived in the inbox, not spam.
  3. Trigger a real notification — make a test reservation — and confirm that arrives too.

Re-test after moving hosting, changing domain, or changing mail provider.

When email doesn't arrive​

Work down this list:

  1. Is the notification switched on? See Who gets told what.
  2. Are the email settings saved and correct?
  3. Is there an address to send to? No customer email means no email. Restodesk says so where it can.
  4. Check spam on the receiving side.
  5. Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC. This is the usual answer when some recipients get mail and others don't.
  6. Check your provider's sending limits. Some hosts cap messages per hour, and a busy service can hit it.

What gets sent by email​

Anything switched on under Settings › Notifications — see Who gets told what. Plus:

Receipt and message languages​

Restodesk supports multiple languages, and receipts can print in more than one. See Language.

The customer site language is set separately — see Customer site.

Good to know​

  • Email settings are read from the database, so they apply to background jobs and scheduled mail as well as the app.
  • Email is per restaurant, not per branch.
  • If email is unconfigured, notifications that depend on it silently do nothing. That's the first thing to check when something "isn't working".
  • Sending is a background job. A short delay is normal; hours is not.

Next​

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