These day's it's hard for a software provider like Caterbook to send emails on your behalf. Because they come from "our" server with "your" address on them, there's a good chance that your guest's ISP could tag that booking confirmation email as SPAM, and it might not arrive.
If we were to send the email from "no-reply@caterbook.com" the email will probably get through, but that doesn't look great for your guest - and they wouldn't be able to reply to you, so what's the solution?
You can configure your own SMTP (outbound email) credentials in Caterbook, and just like your Outlook or Thunderbird email client, Caterbook then sends the emails through your own email account. So, the email actually does come from you and gets through to your guest without being spam tagged. (Note that this only works for outbound email, our system has no way of reading your inbound emails.)
If you are using Gmail as your email provider please see our article here.
If you are using Microsoft Outlook on Windows, click into it and hit CTRL-ALT-S at the same time, and then choose the Edit button at the top right. From the next pop up, select your main "reception" email account and click Account Properties.
The next window has 4 tabs, and you can use information on the Email and Advanced tabs to configure Caterbook as your sending account.
If you are using Outlook on a Mac, click Tools from the menu, and then Accounts for your connection details.
From Settings / Property / Email/SMS Settings within Caterbook:
Change the Mail provider to SMTP (Your email account) by clicking the blue link.
Enter the information from your Outlook (or other email client) - the image below uses colour highlights to match the information from Outlook with what you need to enter in Caterbook. (Your Password, if not known, will need to be obtained from your IT department or email provider.)
Once you have finished, click the blue Send Test Email button to make sure this is working.
Troubleshooting notes:
If you are using ssl you might need to check with your provider what to set for SMTP port, but it's usually 587, or could possibly be 465. Without ssl, this is likely to be 25 but increasingly mail sent insecurely on port 25 these days is often viewed by ISP's as spam.
The SMTP server user is your email username, and is often your email address but can sometimes just be the first bit before the "@" symbol, eg "reception".
The Mail Account used as sender is the email address you want the recipient to see as the sender.
For further reference. here's a quick guide to the terms used in this article:
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a communication protocol for electronic mail transmission.
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a protocol that protects communication over the internet by encrypting your email traffic so that it cannot be read at any point by third parties.
Computer ports are the communication endpoints of a computer connected to a network. They are separated to differentiate the several processes and make it easier to handle them: so each one has a particular purpose and is associated to a specific protocol.
We would advise that, where you are not certain of your email settings, you check these with your individual provider.