The emails WorkOrders sends

What your customer gets, and when

A customer's job sends them an email at three points: when it is booked in — someone has taken the job and is coming — when it is marked in progress, and when it is completed. Each one carries a link straight to that one job, with no login needed, so a customer can check on their own request without an account or a password. If the original request came in with other addresses on it — a property manager cc'd alongside the tenant, say — those addresses are cc'd on every update too, the same way they were on the message that started the job.

What your customer never gets

Some things stay entirely inside your team, by design:

• The health and safety note — it goes to your company's own H&S address, never to the customer.
• Hours attending — your own estimate of the work, not a promise made to anyone outside the firm.
• Urgency — however a job was triaged, that reading is never in a customer's inbox.
• Internal notes and the job's full timeline — a customer sees the outcome, not the working.

Who it comes from

Every message your company sends leaves from an address on workorders.nz — your firm's own slug, something like hockley@workorders.nz — carrying your company's display name, with your own address as Reply-To so a reply a customer sends lands where you would expect it to. Gmail shows this as "via workorders.nz" next to your name. That is expected, and it is not a bug: mail authentication (DKIM, SPF, DMARC) has to agree that the domain sending the message is the domain that signed it, and that has to be the platform's own domain rather than yours. There is no way to send from your own domain instead — that is not a setting we have not built yet, it is what keeps every company's mail landing in an inbox rather than a spam folder.

Replies thread back onto the job

A reply to a status email does not start a new job — it is recognised as an answer to the one it replied about and lands there, in the same thread a customer is already reading.

What your own team gets

• A technician is emailed — and their phone buzzes — when somebody else hands them a job. Claim a job yourself and you get neither; you already know.
• Owners and administrators are emailed when a connected mailbox stops syncing and needs signing in again. See an email did not become a job for what happens to the mail in the meantime.
• Invitations and password resets come from hello@workorders.nz — platform mail, not sent on behalf of any one company.

What WorkOrders sends you about your own account

Separate from anything to do with a job, and all of it addressed to hello@workorders.nz's side of the fence — this is us writing to you, not your firm writing to a customer.

When you sign up, two things arrive: a welcome, and a separate note asking you to confirm your email address. Confirming is worth the click and is not compulsory — nothing in WorkOrders is locked if you skip it. What it buys is knowing we can actually reach you, which matters most for the things you only find out about when they fail: a password reset, or a note that an inbox has stopped collecting your work. If you change your address later, you will be asked to confirm the new one.

In your first few weeks, the owner gets a short sequence: a welcome on the day you sign up, a nudge on day three if something is still half set up, and a note on day seven if no real job has been through the board yet. Each of those only arrives if the thing it is about is genuinely outstanding — finish setting up on day two and the day-three email never comes.

About your trial: a reminder five days before it ends, and a note on the day it does. If the trial lapses and you do not come back, there is one — only one — email about a fortnight later saying the workspace is still there. There is no sequence behind it.

Later on, if the board goes quiet — a sharp drop against the month before, or a paying account that has never had a real job on it — the owner may get a note asking whether something is wrong. At most once every couple of months.

And every Monday morning, owners and administrators get a summary of the week just gone: what came in, what was finished, what is still open. It is skipped entirely on a week where nothing happened, so an empty inbox on a Monday means a quiet week rather than a fault.

All of the above can be switched off — from your profile, or from the unsubscribe link in the footer of any one of them, which works without signing in. Two things cannot: the trial reminders and the trial-ended note. Those are about whether you can still get into the system, and switching them off would be a way of arranging to be locked out with no warning.

Your own notification preferences

Each person in your company decides for themselves, on their profile page, which of these they want and on which channel — email, or a desktop browser notification. Not everything sent by the product appears here: most of what WorkOrders sends goes to a customer, to a shared address like the H&S inbox, or to someone who does not have an account yet, and none of that is a personal preference to switch off. What is offered is only the mail and notifications that land on you specifically:

• A new work order arrives — a desktop notification only, and switched off by default, because on a busy day that would fire for every job of the day.
• A work order is assigned to me — email and desktop, both on by default.
• A mailbox stops syncing — email and desktop, both on by default, and only offered to owners and administrators.
• Help getting set up, and the odd reminder — email only, on by default, and only offered to the owner. Turning it off never silences anything about your trial or your plan.
• A weekly summary of the board — email only, on by default, offered to owners and administrators.

One notification is not optional for a technician: the phone push telling the field app a new job has arrived. That is not a preferences-screen oversight — the phone is how work is dispatched in the first place, so it always fires. What lands on the phone, and what a technician does with it, is taking a job.

Questions people ask