I’m not sure if this should happen or not, but most other invoicing systems I’ve used give me a notification when a cient views their invoice in the email the system sent them.
With Invoice Ninja, it seems the “X client has viewed invoice Y” notification only happens when they view the invoice in the client portal.
Is that the intended functionality? If so, are there any plans to add that tracking pixel to the email? That would be a much truer example of “viewed”, since most clients paying by check would have no reason to click through to the portal since the PDF is attached and they can view/print it from email.
The app supports email view tracking with Postmark.
https://invoice-ninja.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configure.html#postmark-bounce-and-open-notifications
We don’t have immediate plans to support other email providers.
There’s no Postmark option in self hosted, though. Just SMTP, Mail, Sendmail, and Mailgun.
Is Postmark supposed to be an option when you’re self hosting?
To use Postmark with a self host install you need to manually edit the .env file.
Do I need to remove the SMTP settings from .env, or will adding Postmark to .env “just work”?
Looks like I just add the Postmark stuff.
Where do I see some sort of chart of opens and whatnot now? I don’t see anything in Activity other than the fact that I sent my test. Shouldn’t I see the Open event there, too?
First off, make sure to add the web hook URLs in the Postmark portal.
You can see the email opened date by hovering the info icon on the edit invoice page near the contact details. There’s also an email dashboard available from the reports page.
The “Email opened” date was there when I used Gmail, too.
And the Report on Emails leaves a lot to be desired, too.
I guess it is what it is, though.
Email open tracking isn’t supported with Gmail, it uses webhooks which are only implemented for Postmark.
You can also click ‘Email history’ on the client overview page to access the Postmark logs.