Email Setup
Dryad Receipting can email receipts to donors as PDF attachments. By default, emails are sent through Salesforce's own email system, which needs no extra setup beyond a sender address and email templates. For larger volumes and delivery tracking, you can switch on the optional Dryad Mailer. This article explains how each option works, its limits, how it handles bounced emails, and how to choose. It is written for Salesforce administrators.
How Receipt Emails Work
Whichever sending option you use, a receipt email is put together the same way:
- To: the donor's email address. With Salesforce email, this is the receipt's Donor Email. With Dryad Mailer, it is the email of the person receiving the receipt: see Who Receives the Email below.
- From: the receipt's Sender Email, which comes from Receipt Settings or, if you use them, the gift's Receipting Account.
- Message: a Salesforce email template (English or French), chosen the same way as receipt templates. Sample templates are created when the app is installed.
- Attachment: the receipt's PDF.
Only receipts with a Receipt Delivery Status of "To be Emailed" are sent. That requires the donor to prefer email delivery, an email address on the receipt, and an email template. Once sent, the receipt is marked Receipt Emailed.
Receipts can be emailed in three ways:
- Batch Receipts > Email receipts sends receipts waiting to be emailed. When they're listed in a table, select which ones to email; if you select none, nothing is sent and the screen says "No receipts were emailed." This is the only path that uses Dryad Mailer when it is switched on.
- The Email Receipt action on a single Receipt always sends through Salesforce.
- The scheduled receipt job, if you have scheduled it with the option to create receipts and email them, sends the receipts waiting to be emailed that were issued today or yesterday, through Salesforce. Older receipts are left for Batch Receipts. See the Scheduled Job article.
The Send Emails Using setting ("Salesforce" or "Amazon SES") chooses the service for bulk emailing. The Receipt Settings article covers every email setting in detail.
Who Receives the Email
Donors are Accounts. For an individual (a person account), the email goes to the person's own email address. For an organization, it depends on the sending option:
- Salesforce email sends to the organization's Receipt Email, or if that is blank, to the email of its Receipt Recipient.
- Dryad Mailer always sends to the Receipt Recipient's email, and doesn't use Receipt Email. An organization with no Receipt Recipient can't be emailed through Dryad Mailer.
If you use Dryad Mailer, give every organization that receives emailed receipts a Receipt Recipient.
Option 1: Salesforce Email (Default)
Out of the box, Send Emails Using is set to "Salesforce". Emails go out through your Salesforce org, like any other email Salesforce sends.
Setup Checklist
- Add your sender address in Setup > Organization-Wide Addresses, verify it from the email Salesforce sends to that mailbox, and make it available to all profiles. Then enter the same address as the Sender Email Address in Receipt Settings (and on each Receipting Account, if you use them). If the addresses don't match, sending fails with "The sender email address is not specified or not found in the Organization-Wide Email settings."
- Check deliverability. In Setup > Deliverability, Access level must be "All email". New sandboxes are set to "System email only", so no receipts leave a sandbox until you change this.
- Review the email templates. Edit the sample English and French templates, or create your own, and select them on the Templates page of Settings.
- Set the Daily Email Limit in Receipt Settings. See the limits below.
- Improve deliverability (recommended). Ask your IT team to set up DKIM for your sending domain in Setup > DKIM Keys, and to include Salesforce in your domain's SPF record. Emails that are authenticated this way are less likely to land in spam.
Greetings in emails to organizations. Salesforce email fills in recipient merge fields, such as {{{Recipient.Name}}} in the sample templates, from the donor's person account or the organization's Receipt Recipient. When an organization has no Receipt Recipient, those merge fields show the details of the user who sent the email. Give organizations a Receipt Recipient, or use a greeting that doesn't name the recipient.
Limits
Two limits apply, and whichever is reached first stops sending for the day:
| Limit | How It Works |
|---|---|
| Salesforce's daily email allowance | Salesforce caps the number of emails an org can send to external addresses through automation. In Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance editions, this is 5,000 per day. Developer Edition and trial orgs have much lower limits. Salesforce counts its day in GMT. This allowance is shared with everything else in your org that sends single emails through code or automation, not just receipts. |
| Daily Email Limit (Receipt Settings) | Dryad Receipting's own cap on receipts emailed per day, 5,000 by default. Set it lower to leave room in Salesforce's allowance for your other emails, or to spread a large mailing over several days. The count resets each day. |
Before each group of emails is sent, Dryad Receipting checks both limits. If a group would go over, it isn't sent, and the user sees: "You've reached the daily limit for sending emails. You can continue tomorrow without loss." Unsent receipts stay "To be Emailed", so you can run the email step again the next day and it picks up where it stopped.
Year-end planning. At 5,000 per day, emailing 12,000 annual receipts takes three days through Salesforce. If that is too slow, consider Dryad Mailer.
How Bounces Are Handled
With Salesforce email, a receipt is marked Receipt Emailed as soon as Salesforce accepts the email. Salesforce doesn't report back whether it was actually delivered.
- Problems caught straight away, such as an address that isn't a valid email format, stop that email. The receipt is not marked as emailed, and the error is shown in the results.
- Bounces that happen later, such as a mailbox that no longer exists or is full, are not recorded on the Receipt or the Account. The bounce notice goes back to your sender address.
So someone needs to monitor the sender mailbox after each mailing, correct the donor's email address in Salesforce, and resend the receipt. An official receipt that was already emailed can't simply be emailed again: void it and issue a replacement, or print and mail it.
If Bounce Management is turned on in Setup > Deliverability, also tick Return bounced emails to sender, so that bounce notices still reach your mailbox.
Option 2: Dryad Mailer (Optional)
Dryad Mailer sends receipt emails through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), a high-volume email service, instead of Salesforce. It is switched on by setting Send Emails Using to "Amazon SES", once the connection to Amazon has been set up.
How It Works
- When you email receipts from Batch Receipts > Email receipts, Dryad Receipting creates an Email record for the mailing, with one Email Recipient record per receipt, and starts sending. The receipts are marked as emailed.
- Each email is sent through Amazon SES, and its Email Recipient's Status becomes "Sent" or "Failed" (with an error message). An email activity is logged on the recipient's person account.
- Amazon then reports what happened to each email: delivered, opened, bounced, or marked as spam. Each report is saved as an Email Event and updates the Email Recipient's Delivered, Opened, Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce checkboxes.
- When all recipients have been processed, the Email record's Status becomes "Complete". Check the Email Recipients for any that failed.
Advantages
| Advantage | What It Means for You |
|---|---|
| Higher volume | Not limited by Salesforce's 5,000-per-day allowance or the Daily Email Limit setting, and it doesn't use up the allowance your other Salesforce emails need. Year-end receipts can go out in one run. Amazon applies its own sending quota to your SES account, which is normally far higher. |
| Delivery tracking | For every receipt you can see whether the email was sent, delivered and opened, on the Email Recipient record. You can report on it, for example to find donors who never opened their receipt. |
| Bounces recorded in Salesforce |
|
| Safe retries | The Reset Recipients button on an Email record puts failed and soft-bounced recipients back to "Ready", skipping hard bounces. Then use the Send Email button to try them again. |
| Email validation | The Validate Email button on an Account, and the Validate Emails button on Account list views, ask Amazon how likely a person's address is to be valid and save the answer in Email Validation Status ("High", "Medium" or "Low Confidence"). Checking addresses before year-end reduces bounces and protects your sending reputation. |
| Sender reputation | Mail is sent from your own verified domain through Amazon's dedicated email infrastructure, which helps receipts reach inboxes rather than spam folders. |
What Setup Involves
Dryad Mailer is an optional feature. Contact Dryad to enable it. Setup includes:
- an Amazon SES account with your sender address or domain verified
- a Named Credential in Salesforce that connects to Amazon
- a Configuration Set in Amazon that sends delivery events back to Salesforce through a secure endpoint on a Salesforce Site
- switching Send Emails Using to "Amazon SES" in Receipt Settings
The Receipt Settings article describes the related settings: Sender Email Address, Configuration Set Name and Named Credential.
Things to know.
- Every email is sent from the Sender Email Address in Receipt Settings, even for receipts issued by a Receipting Account.
- Emails go to the recipient's current email address, read when the email is sent, not to the address stored on the receipt. Organizations need a Receipt Recipient.
- Each email's attachment must be under 5 MB. Larger PDFs fail with an error on the Email Recipient.
- Delivery and open tracking need the Configuration Set. Without it, emails are still sent, but the tracking checkboxes stay blank.
- Opens are detected when the donor's email program loads images. Some programs block or pre-load images, so treat open tracking as a guide, not a guarantee.
- The single Email Receipt button and the scheduled receipt job still send through Salesforce, and count toward its limits.
Choosing an Option
| Salesforce Email | Dryad Mailer | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Org-wide address and email templates | Amazon SES account and connection, set up with Dryad |
| Daily volume | Up to 5,000 per day, shared with your other Salesforce emails | Your Amazon SES quota, normally much higher |
| Organizations | Receipt Email or Receipt Recipient | Receipt Recipient only |
| Delivered and opened | Not tracked | Tracked per receipt |
| Bounces | Notices arrive in the sender mailbox and must be handled by hand | Recorded in Salesforce as hard or soft bounces, ready for reports |
| Retrying failures | Void and reissue, or print | The Reset Recipients button, then the Send Email button |
| Email validation | Not available | Validate Email buttons on Accounts |
Salesforce email is a good fit if you email fewer than a few thousand receipts at a time and can check a mailbox for bounces. Dryad Mailer is worth it if you email large numbers of receipts at year end, need to know which receipts were actually delivered, or want bounces handled inside Salesforce.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Check |
|---|---|
| "The sender email address is not specified or not found in the Organization-Wide Email settings." | The receipt's Sender Email doesn't match a verified Organization-Wide Address available to all profiles. Check Receipt Settings and the Receipting Account. |
| "You've reached the daily limit for sending emails." | Salesforce's daily allowance or the Daily Email Limit was reached. Run the email step again tomorrow; unsent receipts are still waiting. Check whether other automation in your org is using the Salesforce allowance. |
| Receipts show as emailed but donors didn't get them | With Salesforce email, check the sender mailbox for bounce notices and ask donors to check their spam folder. In a sandbox, check Deliverability. With Dryad Mailer, check the Email Recipient's Status and bounce checkboxes. |
| A receipt isn't offered for emailing | Its Receipt Delivery Status isn't "To be Emailed". Check the donor's delivery preference, the email address on the receipt, and that an email template is assigned. Batch Receipts also only finds receipts that you can see. |
| An email to an organization greets a staff member by name | The organization has no Receipt Recipient, so Salesforce filled in the recipient merge fields with the sender's details. Add a Receipt Recipient, or change the email template's greeting. |
| Dryad Mailer recipients are "Failed" | Read the Error Message on the Email Recipient. Common causes: no email address (for example an organization without a Receipt Recipient), no email template, attachment over 5 MB, or a connection problem with Amazon. Fix the cause, then use the Reset Recipients button and the Send Email button. |
| Dryad Mailer tracking checkboxes never change | The Configuration Set is missing or not sending events to Salesforce. Contact Dryad to check the connection. |