The Files.com application sends emails for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to file notifications, E-Mailed share links, share link notifications, share link uploader receipts, and password reset instructions.

Customizing Welcome Emails

By default, new users are sent a welcome Email when they are added to your site. Site administrators can change how Welcome Emails are generated. To access the Welcome Email settings, type "Welcome emails" in the search box at the top of every page and click on the matching result. Choose Disabled to prevent the system from sending any Welcome Emails.

In addition to completely disabling Welcome Emails, other settings allow site administrators to customize the contents. The CC welcome emails to optional setting allows you to specify an address that will receive a copy of each Welcome Email generated by your site. The Welcome email subject text setting lets you change the subject line of the email; if this is left blank, the default subject is "(Your site name) - Welcome!" Text entered in the Welcome email text setting is included in every message, if you leave the setting blank, the default text is "A new account has been created for you."

Email From Address

Emails have both a From and a Reply-To address. In order to be SPF and DMARC compliant, the From address needs to be an address actually related to the sending email server.

Files.com will set the From address to "no-reply@files.com" because the mail is being sent from a Files.com mail server.

Site administrators can customize the Reply-To address. Type "Email notifications reply-to address" in the search box at the top of every page and select the matching result. Scroll down to locate Email notifications reply to address. If this address has not been set, Files.com will use the main site contact email address as the reply-to address.

If your site was previously migrated from ExaVault, and this Reply-To address has not been set, then the email address that was originally used to sign up for ExaVault will be used.

Custom SMTP

In order to customize the From field, as opposed to just Reply-To, your site must send mail using your own mail server using SMTP. You will need to provide a username and password that corresponds with the account on your mail server that you want to use, and it must accept SMTP connections (mail server outbound) connections from our public IPs.

To configure your SMTP server, type "Custom SMTP" in the search box at the top of every page and click on the matching result. As part of enabling Custom SMTP, you will be able to specify the email address and name used for the From field in outbound emails. Custom SMTP, if configured, will be used for all mail that comes from your site.

Check the documentation of your email service provider for the exact configuration settings required. For example, Microsoft 365 Outlook has a default server address of smtp.office365.com and uses port 587, while Google Mail has a default server address of smtp.gmail.com and uses either port 587 (TLS) or port 465 (SSL). If you have any problems connecting, please contact your email service provider to check if additional security settings on your email server have to be configured in order to allow the connection.

Whitelisting Files.com for Deliverability

Application mails from Files.com are SPF, DMARC, and DKIM compliant. If you have email filters in place, you should be able to rely on these technologies. If you need to specifically whitelist Files.com's mail sender IPs (and you are not using Custom SMTP), be aware that Files.com sends mail via Amazon SES, which has a very large IP range, and we would not recommend whitelisting that entire range anywhere. You may be able to use the From or Reply-To address for whitelisting, as explained above.

Troubleshooting Email Delivery Issues

If you're not receiving emails from Files.com in your inbox as expected, it may be due to your exchange servers blocking or rejecting emails from Files.com. Within your organization's network, certain intermediate servers like email gateways, forwarders, mail transfer agents, or security systems can modify email content or headers for tagging or classification purposes during transit. This can lead to changes in the subject line, headers, or email content, potentially causing issues with DKIM signature validity or DMARC/SPF validation. If this happens, it could result in your mail servers rejecting Files.com emails. To address this, we recommend reviewing the settings of your organization's intermediate servers to resolve email authentication problems.

Site Alert Emails

By default, site administrators will receive alert emails from Files.com when there is trouble with their site. These include alerts about LDAP, SMTP, Webhook or single sign-on integration failures, alerts about SSL certificates about to expire, Remote Server Sync and GPG encryption/decryption errors, user locked out due to too many failures, CLI operation failure for logs to be sent to the cloud and similar messages.

Site Administrators can opt in or out of receiving these site alert emails via the Site alert emails setting at My account. If no site administrator has Site alert emails turned on, then all administrators will receive email alert messages when issues occur.

In order to avoid spamming people with these emails, we delay the frequency of these emails on sites with lots of errors. If your site regularly has errors, do not rely on these emails as the sole mechanism for learning about the errors.

Business Emails from Files.com

In addition to automated emails sent by the Files.com application, you may also receive email communication from individuals at the Files.com company, such as support, billing, and sales emails. These are not necessarily sent via the same mechanisms as app emails, and will never be sent through your Custom SMTP server.