PBJ CRM 1.27.0 — one place to say how your email leaves

PBJ CRM 1.27.0 is out. It adds one thing, and it is the sort of thing you only notice by its absence: one place to say how email leaves your website, covering the CRM and every add-on at once.

Why this needed doing

Before writing a line of it we went through every place the suite sends an email. The answer was not tidy. Appointment and visit emails — including the calendar invitations — went out through WordPress’s built-in mailer, while claiming a from-address they had never actually signed in to. Most help desk notices (assignments, overdue warnings, escalations, portal invites) went out the same way with no sender identity at all. Invoice reminders defaulted to it, and quietly fell back to it whenever a chosen mailbox could not be used. Only marketing campaigns reliably went through a real mailbox.

Mail sent that way is a coin toss. The service receiving it has no way to check your website was allowed to send as you, so it is filed as spam or refused outright — and nobody tells you. If you have ever had a customer say “I never got that”, this is the most likely reason.

What 1.27.0 adds

A new Email delivery card on Connected accounts, sitting directly under your mailboxes. It gives you:

• How email leaves. The website’s own mailer, exactly as now — or send everything through one of your own mailboxes. There are no new server or password boxes: it uses the mailbox you already set up on the card above it. Gmail and Google Workspace, Microsoft, or any ordinary mail account.
• What the sender line says. Leave every message alone; fill it in only where a message did not set one; or always send as one address. The middle option is the default, and it is the one that rescues the appointment and help desk emails above without touching anything that was already correct.
• A tick box that keeps the hidden return address on the same domain as the mailbox. That is the half of the sender that receiving services actually check, and leaving it alone is the usual reason mail from a correct-looking address still lands in spam.
• A “Send a test email” button that reports back what the mail server actually said, in its own words, when something is wrong.

What it deliberately does not do

Nothing changes when you upgrade. The shipped setting is “the website’s own mailer”, so 1.27.0 behaves exactly like 1.26.0 until you choose a mailbox yourself.

It never touches attachments or the message itself, so appointment invitations still arrive as proper calendar invitations rather than an unreadable file. Where a campaign or an invoice was already set to send from its own particular mailbox, that choice still wins. And if a mailbox is deleted, switched off, or its sign-in expires, your mail still goes out the old way rather than failing silently — the card tells you, in plain English, what is wrong.

No database change. Existing licence keys carry it: 1.27.0 is a free update for everyone who owns PBJ CRM 1.x.

Full history on the PBJ CRM changelog.