---
title: Transactional Email and Templates
description: "Transactional email is everything RackHelm sends automatically in response to something happening: an invoice being raised, a payment failing, a ticket being answered, a service being provisioned. This article explains where those messages come from, what you can and cannot…"
url: "https://rackhelm.com/documentation/transactional-email/"
updated: "2026-09-24"
category: System Administration
---

# Transactional Email and Templates

Transactional email is everything RackHelm sends automatically in response to something happening: an invoice being raised, a payment failing, a ticket being answered, a service being provisioned. This article explains where those messages come from, what you can and cannot change about them, and how they are branded.

## How transactional email is produced

Each message is generated by a notification class in the application, not from an editable template row. There are around twenty of them, covering:

| Area | Messages |
| --- | --- |
| Billing | Invoice generated, invoice reminder, payment succeeded, payment failed, payment method expiring soon |
| Orders and services | Order created, service provisioned, manual provisioning required, SSL certificate issued |
| Support | New ticket, ticket replied, ticket assigned, ticket closed, ticket auto-close reminder, guest ticket verification |
| Accounts | Email verification |
| Staff alerts | New client registered, pending bank transfer, scheduled job failed, and the generic admin event message |

All but one of these are queued, so they are sent by a background worker rather than during the customer's request. If your queue workers are stopped, transactional email stops with them — see [Maintenance, Logs and Health](/docs/maintenance-and-health/).

> **Note:** There is no admin screen for editing transactional email wording. RackHelm ships a `manage_email_templates` permission key, but no screen is bound to it, and no create/edit form for email templates exists in the admin area. If you need different wording, that is a change to the application, not a setting.

## What you can change: branding

Every transactional message is rendered through one shared Markdown mail layout, and that layout is branded from your settings:

- The header shows your **Navigation Bar Logo** from **Platform Settings → Theme Settings**. With no logo uploaded, it falls back to your company name as text.
- The sender name is your **Company Name** and the sender address is **Override From Address** from the mail screen.
- Links in the message are built from **Company URL**, which is pinned deliberately rather than taken from the incoming request, so a spoofed host cannot mint a reset link pointing somewhere else.

Between them, those three settings are what makes the platform look like your business rather than ours. See [Theme and Branding](/docs/theme-and-branding/) and [Mail Settings and the Email Log](/docs/mail-settings-smtp/).

## Where editable email content does exist

Three separate features do have editable content, and they are easy to confuse with transactional email:

| Feature | What it is |
| --- | --- |
| **Mass Mailer** campaigns and campaign templates | Marketing email you compose and send to a segment. Fully editable, under **Mass Mailer** in the sidebar. |
| **Canned replies** | Reusable ticket answers your agents insert while replying. Under **Support → Canned Replies**. |
| **Admin notification actions** | Staff-facing alerts. You choose which events go where, but not the wording. See [Admin Notifications](/docs/admin-notifications/). |

### Inbound-route autoresponders

RackHelm has an `email_templates` table with a name, subject and body, and an inbound email route can reference one as an autoresponder: when mail arrives on that route and creates a ticket, the stored subject and body are sent back to the sender as a plain-text acknowledgement.

> **Warning:** This is wired up in the background but not exposed in the admin area. There is no screen for creating an email template, and the route editor under **Support → Email Routing** does not currently offer an autoresponder picker. Unless a template row and a route reference are created directly in the database, no autoresponder is sent. Do not plan around this feature; use the ticket system's own "new ticket" notification instead.

## Confirming what was sent

Every message handed to the mailer is recorded in **Security → Email Logs** with its recipient, subject and full rendered body. That is the place to check the exact wording a customer received, and to confirm a message was produced at all.

![An email log row expanded to show the rendered HTML body of a sent message](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/system-email-log-body.png)
Opening a log row shows the message exactly as it was rendered, branding included.

## Troubleshooting

| Symptom | Cause and fix |
| --- | --- |
| No transactional email at all, but the mail test works | The test sends inline; nearly everything else is queued. Start or restart the queue workers. |
| Messages show a plain text company name instead of a logo | No **Navigation Bar Logo** has been uploaded on the theme screen, or the `public/storage` symlink is missing so the image cannot be fetched. |
| Buttons in emails link to `localhost` or the wrong domain | **Company URL** is wrong. Fix it on [General & System](/docs/company-settings-general-system/). |
| You need different wording in a customer email | Not configurable. Raise it with your RackHelm supplier — the text lives in the application's notification classes. |
| An autoresponder never fires on an inbound mail route | Expected: there is no UI for configuring one. See the warning above. |
| Admin alerts arrive but customer email does not (or the reverse) | They are separate systems. Admin alerts run through the notification subsystem and its own delivery log; customer mail runs through the mailer and the email log. Check the matching log for each. |