Your own WorkOrders address

You already have one

Every company on WorkOrders gets its own email address, created at the same time as the company. It looks like yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz, with your own name in front, and it was working before you finished signing up.

Anything emailed to it becomes a work order on your board. There's nothing to connect, no password, and nothing to set up on your own domain. You can't switch it off, so it keeps working even if something else, like a connected mailbox, has stopped.

Where to find it

Go to Settings → Mailboxes. The first card on the page is Your WorkOrders address, with the address 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 name. There are two reasons it might not be available. Another firm on WorkOrders might already have it, or it might be one of a handful of names we keep for our own mail system (support, info, admin and the standard addresses every mail domain is expected to have). Either way, we add a number so your address is still unique.

The number doesn't mean anything about your business, and it doesn't mean someone outside WorkOrders is using your name. The settings card tells you which of the two reasons applies to you.

Changing it

You don't have to keep the address you were given. On Settings → Mailboxes, press Change beside the address and type the part in front of the @, using letters, numbers and hyphens. Most firms use their business name. If the plain version was taken by a company that has since left, it's free again and you can have it.

Before you do, be aware that the old address stops working as soon as you save. Mail sent to it won't arrive, and the sender gets a message saying so. So if you're going to change it, do it early, and update anywhere you've already printed or sent it.

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 address that turns it into a job.
• Put it on the van, if you have room for one more address.
• Forward your existing inbox to it. This is what most firms should do. There's more on it below.

It's an ordinary email address. You can email it yourself to raise a job, and people often do. Forwarding a request that came in some other way is the quickest way to get it onto the board.

Forwarding an inbox you already have

We recommend this for almost everyone. It's the best option if your mail provider won't let you connect over IMAP, or if nobody wants to hand out a password.

Set up a rule in your existing mail (Gmail, Microsoft 365, or whatever your host gives you) that forwards incoming mail to your jobs.workorders.nz address. Your customers keep writing to the address they've always used, the mail still arrives in your inbox as it always has, and a copy comes to WorkOrders and becomes a job.

A forwarded message is handled exactly like any other. It keeps the same sender, subject and attachments. If you later connect that mailbox as well, you won't get two of everything, because WorkOrders recognises the same message arriving twice and only makes one job from it. Connecting the mailbox over IMAP takes about ten minutes longer. It's worth it if you want processed mail moved into its own folder, or if you'd rather not rely on a forwarding rule that someone could 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're not already one of your customers, WorkOrders creates a customer record from the details in the email.
• 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. They're saved on the job, where the crew can open them.
• Images pasted into the body of the email are kept too, as long as they're over about 5 KB. Smaller images are usually signature logos or the invisible tracking images in marketing mail, and you don't want those cluttering up a job. A file that was actually attached is kept whatever its size.
• Images the email only links to are never downloaded. If a picture in the message is stored on someone else's web server, WorkOrders doesn't fetch it, for security reasons. Downloading those images tells the sender the message was opened, and it can be used to trick a mail system into requesting things for someone else. 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 and they reply, the reply is added to that job. It doesn't create a second work order, and nobody has to close a duplicate.

Each of those emails has its own reply address for that job, something like wo-a1b2c3d4@reply.workorders.nz. When the customer presses reply, their email goes to that address, which tells WorkOrders which job it's about. They don't need to keep the subject line or quote a reference number. If the reply address gets lost along the way, WorkOrders can still match the reply using the threading details that email programs add to every reply.

That second kind of match only works for jobs that were closed in the last thirty days. If the job was closed longer ago than that, the reply starts a new work order that links back to the old one. A reply sent to the job's own reply address is always added to the job, however old it is.

Why the address you get mail from isn't the one you write to

This confuses everyone the first time, so it's worth reading now.

• You receive at yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz.
• WorkOrders sends from yourfirm@workorders.nz (without the jobs.), with your firm's name on it. When a customer replies, the reply goes back onto the job, as described above.

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

Sending this way stops your customers' updates going to their junk folder. Mail systems check that the address a message says it's from matches the domain that sent it. We can prove we sent mail from workorders.nz, because it's our domain, but we can't do that for your domain. If we sent as you@yourfirm.co.nz, it would look right in the inbox but fail those checks, and some customers would stop getting your updates without you ever knowing. Sending from our domain with your name on it passes the checks every time.

Mail you receive comes in on a separate domain, jobs.workorders.nz, for a similar reason. An address that's printed on job sheets and typed into supplier websites eventually attracts junk mail. Keeping that mail off the domain we send from means it can't affect whether your customers' status emails get delivered.

If something you sent there hasn't appeared

Mail to your WorkOrders address is processed as soon as it arrives, not on a timer, so if it's been a few minutes something else is going on. Some kinds of mail are never turned into jobs, and each one is recorded with a reason instead of being thrown away. An email didn't become a job goes through the list.

If you're still deciding how requests should reach you, start with how work gets into WorkOrders.