QuickBooks Online Spoofing Emails

Hi @BookkeepingBecky 

I'll start by stating that I don't actually use any emailing feature in QBO because we mostly deal with large companies & it looks amateurish - so please read the comments below with that in mind.

I also don't use the Advanced package - that may be different (but I doubt it).

To the best of my knowledge, emails sent via QBO are simply sent from a common email address (quickbooks<@>notification.intuit.com) with the sender name Bloggs Widgets Ltd & the reply-to field set to accounts<@>bloggswidgets.com  

This is not 'spoofing' as such & should not require any adjustments at domain or server level.

There are many posts on here saying that emails are not being sent or not being received by customers.  The most likely cause of this is overactive spam filters and/or bad configuration of Intuit's email servers - bear in mind the volume of email that QBO will be sending out from that one address, even though they use many servers, it make spam filters very twitchy.

The most you (or your customers can do) is check Spam/Junk folders & mark anything in there from QBO as Not Spam or whitelist the quickbooks<@>notification.intuit.com email address.

The problem (I think) is that some of the old help files or USA help files do refer to configuring SPF settings on your email server.  This is all nonsense.  Anyone directing you to do this is wasting your time!

In fact, there have been many requests for QBO to allow this (it would make QBO emails look as though they came from bloggswidgets.com rather than intuit.com).  The requests have been steadfastly ignored because it would open a huge can of worms (every man & his dog would then expect QBO support staff to guide them through the domain settings process).

The only way you can get QBO to email as bloggswidgets.com is if Bloggs Widgets uses Google Apps/Suite/Workspace or whatever they call it this week.  Then the Send by GMail feature does seem to work with GSuite addresses (again, I don't actually use this but I did test it while ago).

Hope this helps.

Hi Paul, 

We'd be more than happy with the emails being sent by quickbooks<@>notification.intuit.com but Quickbooks themselves have confirmed that the emails are set to be "sent" from our email address via spoofing. I've spoken to many many advisors at this stage who have all confirmed the same thing so not sure if this is due to it being a new subscription (there are several differences already compared to older subscriptions which still have certain features enabled) or whether it's because it's an advanced subscription - I have absolutely no idea.

In the US they are able to set Smtp settings to actually send from your own domain but here it isn't even passing through the exchange as its trying to spoof but is being blocked due to DKIM being enabled. Honestly why we have no option to just send fromquickbooks<@>notification.intuit.com is beyond me as this would solve our issues!

In response to your advice about customers whitelisting the email address, it's never hitting their mail servers in the first place. 

An absolute disaster of a service! They keep confirming that it is "working correctly as designed" 

Hi @BookkeepingBecky 

The only thing you can check is that your email address is set correctly in the contact detials section of https://app.qbo.intuit.com/app/accountsettings 

If Send-as-Domain is really available in QBO Advanced (I'm 99.9% sure it isn't & the support staff are wrong or using confusing language or stalling for time while the system comes back online) then there will be a setting in there to turn it on/off & revert to using quickbooks<@>notification.intuit.com because not everyone will want or need it.  Certainly not everyone will be able to configure it correctly because the SPF/DKIM settings can be quite complicated.

SMTP is something different - these settings were available in the old QB Desktop I think (later versions would only work by piggybacking onto MS Outlook though).  Using SMTP would require entering your email address & password into QBO Settings.

Your best workaround @BookkeepingBecky  would simply be to download your invoices (pdf files) & send via your usual email system.

There are so many reports on here of QBO email problems that I steer clear of it altogether.

An alternative (more generous) view to the support staff being wrong or using confusing language or stalling for time while the system comes back online...

If you search DKIM on the QBO Support Site, the results that come back refer to QBO Advanced Payroll.  It seems that Advanced Payroll does allow Email Sender Authentication due to the sensitive nature of payroll information.

Maybe this is where the confusion is coming from?

Hi Paul,

We've been through all the troubleshooting (I've spent 40+ hours on this so far this week) as has the IT Consultant who has also received the same confirmations from QuickBooks's technical team. Unfortunately we have absolutely no control at our end as this is the  full extent of the email settings:

Contact info
Company email
Where QuickBooks can contact you.
example<@>example.com

Customer-facing email
Where your customers can contact you. Shown on sales forms.
accounts<@>example.com

They have confirmed that the customer facing example (accounts<@>example.com) is the email address being spoofed to send invoices etc. They could all of course be lying but several operators going into extensive detail about how their spoofing works to hide the fact that their intuit email servers are temporarily not working correctly seems a little more than bizarre.

That's the workaround we have in place, unfortunately it's a customer that's sending hundreds of invoices each day so is very cumbersome until QuickBooks put a solution in place