To go paperless - emails going to spam!!

[DanglyEarrings]

We want to go paperless in our office by next year (or at least mainly paperless!) This is because we need to relay information quite regularly and emails is free and it's easy to attach documents.

I am finding more and more that clients do not receive my emails because they go to their 'spam' folder. I got one of our employees to text them all (yes ALL of them except the really elderly, of course) to ask them to add our email addresses into their address books so we can establish contact so they don't miss important information, letters, documents etc. Only 14 of them responded with 'yes ok, will do it'!

What if the rest didn't do it and still don't receive them?

With this in mind - AIBU to try to go paperless this year?

Completely depends what kind of business you run, tbh.

I work paperless in a law firm. In our field nearly all correspondence (including official government papers etc) has been electronic for a good five years and it was largely electronic for at least another five before that. Going paperless is obvious in that kind of context. It's also the case that our clients and suppliers are also technologically advanced as a rule so we have flurries of correspondence between BlackBerries etc.

I wouldn't expect a builder to be paperless, though, because original signed documents, invoices, delivery notes, etc would be so important a part of the process.

I wouldn't deal with a paperless business. I have to have paper records so either the business sends it or I have to print it.

And I don't trust email not to get hacked/have problems. I know of too many people recently who have been locked out of their email accounts and can't recover them for various reasons.

So imo yabu

Oh I see

Well we always invoice online but not everyone needs and invoice since all payments go through he business account and our clients are private rather than commercial, I must admit we will always bring our welcome pack to new customers which is all on paper and our terms and conditions are within this, I suppose I meant after that though, it would streamline the business a lot.

We have three business email addresses so if one was hacked we could always revert to another one?

That's not what paperless means.

Paperless means you don't keep paper records: you might have some paper but your records and stored documents are electronic. You need very good backups and disaster recovery btw.

You can still send paper invoices or contracts to clients who request them; you just don't use paper internally. If you receive paper you scan it and save it in an appropriate place (eg an invoice goes into the supplier file and is emailed to the accounts person to pay) and shred or archive the original as appropriate.

Does that make sense?

Oh I see, that's better then!

Thank you yes it does!

Well then I don;t want us to go paperless I want our communications to be (on the whole) paperless after the inital consultation if you see what I mean?

How can I get our emails through when they keep going to clients' 'spam' folders?

It may be how you send them - bad keywords or the phrasing of the title or something. Attachments that look like viruses? Multiple recipients?

Sometimes I say it must have gone to spam if I cba to reply.

What kind of domain are you sending from? Does your From match your Reply To?

The idea that you have three email addresses and could use another if one got hacked sounds very unprofessional tbh. Getting a domain registration and managing multiple email addresses within it (even if only three people answer them) is relatively painless and not expensive.

Well I'm no expert on this at all, tech stuff is not really me as you can clearly tell but I don't like sending out letters and printed documents en-masse as it costs a lot and takes an age to get a response.

Two of our emails are from the same domain but the other is for safety, since we had a problem once and needed an emergency contact.

I guess you are right that some people can't be bothered to answer, it's just that sometimes you just NEED to communicate fairly quickly and it would be inconvenient to call someone during their work hours ... not sure what the answer is really?

My company (big financial service company) has been going paperless for about five years now. The amount of work done on paper is slowly reducing but there are plenty of things that we still do by hand on actual pieces of paper. And externally we're not remotely paperless, we do have a lot of elderly customers that don't like doing financial business online and like to have paper records. And also we're an old fashioned company. I've hAd 80 year olds express surprise that they need to send an actual pen and paper letter to us rather than an email

Thanks for all replies, I think given the information I now have, and just to quantify we will now aim to go about 80% paperless, it was a little ambitious to say 'paperless' but I am admittedy not too 'tech' so maybe this too is overly ambitious, we can surely aim for this though!