E-mail settings

The settings at “Settings” → “E-mail” allow you to customize the emails that pretix sends to the participants of your event.

The page is separated into four parts: “E-mail settings”, “E-mail design”, “E-mail content” and “SMTP settings”. We will explain all of them in detail on this page.

E-mail settings

The upper part of the page contains settings that are relevant for the generation of all e-mails alike. Those are currently:

Subject prefix

This text will be prepended to the subject of all e-mails that are related to your event. For example, if you set this to “dc2018” all subjects will be formatted like “[dc2018] Your payment was successful”.

Sender address

All e-mails will be sent with this address in the “From” field. If you use an email address at a custom domain, we strongly recommend to use the SMTP settings below as well, otherwise your e-mails might be detected as spam due to the Sender Policy Framework and similar mechanisms.

Sender name

This is the name associated with the sender address. By default, this is your event name.

Signature

This text will be appended to all e-mails in form of a signature. This might be useful e.g. to add your contact details or any legal information that needs to be included with the e-mails.

Bcc address

This email address will receive a copy of every event-related email.

Attach calendar files

With this option, every order confirmation mail will include an ics file with name, date and location of your event. It can be imported into many digital calendars.

Sales Channels for Checkout Emails

When you are using multiple sales channel, you may want to decide that mails for order and payment confirmation are only to be sent for some sales channels. For orders created through the default online shop, these emails must always be send. A similar option is available for ticket download reminders.

E-mail design

In this part, you can choose and preview the layout of your emails. More layouts can be added by pretix plugins.

E-mail content

The next part of the page allows you to customize the exact texts of all e-mails sent by the system automatically. You can click on the different boxes to expand them and see the texts.

Within the texts, you can use placeholders that will later by replaced by values depending on the event or order. Below every text box is a list of supported placeholders, but currently the following are defined (not every placeholder is valid in every text):

Placeholder	Description
event	The event name
event_slug	The event’s short form
code	In case of the waiting list, the voucher code to redeem
currency	The currency used for the event (three-letter code)
total	The order’s total value
total_with_currency	The order’s total value with a localized currency sign
refund_amount	(For cancellation emails) The amount of money that will be refunded, including the currency
payment_info	Information text specific to the payment method (e.g. banking details)
url	An URL pointing to the download/status page of the order
url_info_change	An URL pointing to the page of the order that can be used to change ticket information
url_products_change	An URL pointing to the page of the order that can be used to change the products in the order
url_cancel	An URL pointing to the page of the order that can be used to cancel the order
name, name_*	Any name that can be used to address the recipient (e.g. name from invoice address, name from first ticket, …)
invoice_name, invoice_name_*	The name field of the invoice address
invoice_company	The company field of the invoice address
attendee_name, attendee_name_*	The name of the attendee represented by the ticket
expire_date	The order’s expiration date
comment	When rejecting an order, this will contain the reason for the rejection
date	The same as expire_date, but in a different e-mail (for backwards compatibility)
orders	A list of orders including links to their status pages, specific to the “resend link (requested by user)” e-mail
hours	In case of the waiting list, the number of hours the voucher code is valid
product	In case of the waiting list, the product that has become available
voucher_list	When sending out vouchers in bulk, this will be replaced with the list of vouchers

The different e-mails are explained in the following:

Placed Order

This e-mail is sent out to every order directly after the order has been received, except if the order total is zero (see below). It should specify that/how the order is to be paid.

Paid Order

This e-mail is sent out as soon as the payment for an order has been received and should give the customer more information on how to proceed, e.g. by downloading their ticket.

Free Order

This e-mail is sent out instead of “Placed Order” and “Paid Order” if the order total is zero. It therefore should tell the same information, except asking the customer for completing their payment.

Resend link

Sent by admin

This e-mail will be sent out if you click the “Resend link” next to the e-mail address field on the order detail page. It should include the link to the order and can be sent to users e.g. if they lost their original e-mails.

Requested by user

Customers can also request a link to all orders they created using their e-mail address themselves by filling out a form on the website. In this case, they will receive an e-mail containing a list of all orders they created with the respective links.

Order changed

This e-mail is sent out if you change the content of the order and choose to notify the user about it.

Payment reminder

This e-mail is sent out a certain number of days before the order’s expiry date. You can specify the number of days before the expiry date that this should happen and the e-mail will only ever be sent if you do specify such a number. The text should ask the customer to complete the payment, tell the options on how to do so and the consequences if no payment is received (ticket gone, depending on your other settings). You should also include a way to contact you in case of questions.

Waiting list notification

If you enable the waiting list feature, this is the mail that will be sent out if a ticket is assigned to a person on the waiting list. It should include the voucher that needs to be redeemed to get the free spot and tell how long that voucher is valid and where to redeem it.

Order canceled

This e-mail is sent to a customer if their order has been canceled.

Order custom mail

You can use pretix’ admin interface to directly send an e-mail with a custom text to the customer of a specific order. In this case, this will be the default text and might save you time by not having to re-type all of it every time.

Reminder to download tickets

If you want, you can configure an email that will be send out a number of days before your event to remind attendees to download their tickets. The e-mail should include a link to the ticket download. This e-mail will only ever be sent if you specify a number of days.

Order approval process

If you configure one of your products to “require approval”, orders of that product will not immediately be confirmed but only after you approved them manually. In this case, the following e-mail templates will be sent out.

Received order

After an order has been received, this e-mail will be sent automatically instead of the “order placed” e-mail from above.

Approved order

This e-mail will be sent after you manually approved an order. This should include instructions to pay for the order, which is why this will only be used for a paid order. For a free order, the “free order” e-mail from above will be sent.

Denied order

This e-mail will be sent out to customers when their order has been denied.

SMTP settings

If you want to send your e-mails via your own e-mail address, we strongly recommend to use SMTP for this purpose. SMTP is a protocol that is used by e-mail clients to communicate with e-mail servers. Using SMTP, pretix can talk to your e-mail service provider the same way that e.g. the e-mail app on your phone can.

Your e-mail provider will most likely have a document that tells you the settings for the various fields to fill in here (hostname, port, username, password, encryption).

With the checkbox “Use custom SMTP server” you can turn using your SMTP server on or off completely. With the button “Save and test custom SMTP connection”, you can test if the connection and authentication to your SMTP server succeeds, even before turning that checkbox on.

Spam issues

If you use an email address of your own domain as a sender address and do not use a custom SMTP server, it is very likely that at least some of your emails will go to the spam folders of their recipients. We strongly recommend to use your organization’s SMTP server in this case, making your email really come from your organization. If you don’t want that or cannot do that, you should add the pretix application server to your SPF record.

If you are using our hosted service at pretix.eu, you can add the following to your SPF record:

include:_spf.pretix.eu

A complete record could look like this:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.pretix.eu ~all

Make sure to read up on the SPF specification.

If you want to authenticate your emails with DKIM, set up a CNAME record for the subdomain pretix._domainkey pointing to dkim.pretix.eu:

pretix._domainkey.mydomain.com. CNAME dkim.pretix.eu.

Then, please contact support@pretix.eu and we will enable DKIM for your domain on our mail servers.

For senders with larger volumes, Google Mail also requires you to have a DMARC policy (that may however be p=none).

Note

Many SMTP servers impose rate limits on the sent emails, such as a maximum number of emails sent per hour. These SMTP servers are often not suitable for use with pretix, in case you want to send an email to many hundreds or thousands of ticket buyers. Depending on how the rate limit is implemented, emails might be lost in this case, as pretix only retries email delivery for a certain time period.