Your own WorkOrders address

You already have one

Every company on WorkOrders gets its own email address, created at the same moment the company is. It looks like yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz — your own name in front, on our mail domain — and it was live before you finished signing up.

Anything emailed to it becomes a work order on your board. There is nothing to connect, no password anywhere, and nothing to configure on your own domain. There is also no way to switch it off, which is deliberate: it is the one route into the system that cannot break, so it is the one we can promise is working when something else has stopped.

Where to find it

Go to Settings → Mailboxes. The first card on the page is Your WorkOrders address, with the address itself in a box and a Copy button next to it. You need to be an owner or an administrator to see that screen.

Why yours might have a number on the end

The part in front of the @ comes from your company's short name. A handful of names are held back because they mean something else on our mail system — support, info, admin and a few housekeeping addresses every mail domain is expected to answer. If your firm's short name happens to be one of those, we add a number so your address is still yours and still unique. It works exactly the same way; it just looks slightly less tidy, and there is nothing to fix.

What to do with it

• Put it on your website. A contact form that emails it, or a plain "for maintenance requests, email…" line, both work.
• Put it on your invoices and job sheets, so a customer with a follow-up writes to the place that will turn it into a job.
• Put it on the van, if you have room for one more address.
• Forward your existing inbox to it — the option most firms should take. More on that below.

It is an ordinary email address. You can email it yourself to raise a job, and people often do: forwarding a request that arrived some other way is the quickest way to get it onto the board.

Forwarding an inbox you already have

This is the recommended route for almost everybody, and especially for any mail provider that will not let you connect over IMAP, or where nobody wants to hand out a password.

Set a rule in your existing mail — Gmail, Microsoft 365, whatever your host gives you — that forwards incoming mail to your jobs.workorders.nz address. Your customers keep writing to the address they have always used, it keeps arriving in your inbox exactly as it always has, and a copy comes here and becomes a job.

A forwarded message is not a second-class one. It is read exactly the same way, with the same sender, subject and attachments. And if you later connect that mailbox properly as well, you will not get two of everything: we recognise the same message arriving twice and raise one job from it. The alternative — connecting the mailbox over IMAP — is worth the extra ten minutes when you want the mail filed as it is processed, or when you would rather not depend on a forwarding rule somebody can turn off by accident.

What happens when somebody emails it

• A work order appears on the board, with the person who sent it as the requester. If they are not already one of your customers, a customer record is made from what the email says about them.
• The subject line becomes the job's subject, and the body of the email becomes the description.
• Attachments are kept — photos, documents, whatever came with it — and hang off the job where the crew can open them.
• Images pasted into the body of the email are kept too, as long as they are over about 5 KB. That floor is there because signature logos and the invisible one-pixel images marketing mail carries are all tiny, and a job whose attachments are three copies of somebody's logo is worse than one with none. A file that was genuinely attached is kept whatever its size.
• Images the email only links to are never fetched. If a picture in the message lives on somebody else's web server, we do not go and download it. That is a security decision, not an oversight — fetching remote images on arrival is how a sender finds out that a message was opened, and how a mail system gets talked into requesting things on somebody else's behalf. If a photo matters, it needs to be attached.

Replies land on the job, not on a new one

When WorkOrders emails your customer about a job — accepted, on the way, finished — and they reply, that reply is attached to the job it is about. It does not create a second work order, and nobody has to close a duplicate.

That works because every one of those emails carries its own reply address, unique to that job: something like wo-a1b2c3d4@workorders.nz. A plain reply from a phone goes to it without anyone thinking about it, and the job number is in the address itself, so there is no subject line to preserve and no reference number for the customer to quote. Replies are also matched on the ordinary threading information mail programs carry, so it still works if the address is stripped somewhere along the way.

One deliberate limit: if a job was closed more than thirty days ago, a reply to it starts a new work order that links back to the old one. "The tap is leaking again" six months later is a new job, not an addition to one the office finished and filed.

Why the address you get mail from is not the one you write to

This confuses everyone once, so it is worth reading before it happens.

• You receive at yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz.
• WorkOrders sends from yourfirm@workorders.nz — no jobs. — with your firm's name on it and your own email address as the reply-to, so that anybody who hits reply on something that is not about a specific job reaches you directly.

In Gmail, mail from WorkOrders shows your firm's name followed by a small via workorders.nz. That is expected, it is not a warning, and it does not mean the message is being treated as suspicious.

The reason for the split is what stops your customers' updates going to their junk folder. Mail systems check that the address a message claims to be from matches the domain that actually signed and sent it. We can sign for workorders.nz, because it is ours; we cannot sign for your domain, because it is not. Sending as you@yourfirm.co.nz would look right in the inbox and quietly fail those checks, and the failure would be invisible to you and permanent for whoever stopped receiving your updates. Sending from our domain with your name on it passes them every time.

Receiving stays on the separate jobs.workorders.nz domain for the matching reason. An address printed on job sheets and pasted into supplier portals gets collected and eventually attracts junk mail; keeping that traffic off the domain we send from means none of it can touch the reputation your customers' status emails depend on.

If something you sent there has not appeared

Mail to your WorkOrders address arrives immediately — it is not on a timer, so if it has been a few minutes something else is going on. Some kinds of mail are deliberately never turned into jobs, and every one of them is recorded with a reason rather than being thrown away: an email did not become a job goes through the list.

If you are still deciding how requests should reach you at all, start with how work gets into WorkOrders.