Beginning with the 2008 series of products, you can use your own email client to send reports and forms via email – provided that you have a preference set correctly, and provided that your email client is one of:
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Outlook Express
- Microsoft Windows Mail
To use any of the above email clients, choose the Outlook setting on the Send Forms sub-menu on the My Preferences tab on the Edit->Preferences menu selection.
Whether you send a report or form via your email client or QuickBooks E-mail, QuickBooks will send the report or form as a PDF attachment.
Users of 2007 series and older are limited to using QuickBooks E-mail, which is an online service provided by Intuit. Access to this service will no longer be available to QuickBooks 2007 users after May 31, 2010.
Online services are only available to users of a current QuickBooks version, so it’s important to monitor Intuit’s service discontinuation policy regarding the availability of online services for your version to avoid unexpected disruption to certain program features.
If you need to upgrade your QuickBooks software to continue to be able to send important forms and reports via email, see the links on our Buy QuickBooks page.
The principal advantage of using your own email client is that you can automatically preserve a copy of the emails you send in a folder in your email program. With QuickBooks E-mail, you need to be sure to send a copy to yourself.
Unfortunately, this capability disappeared in QBPro 2010. It’s Outlook only, as far as I can see. Not even outlook express. Wonder why we upgraded?
Outlook Express is a product that as of QB 2010 was close to the end of its life. It was last updated in 2008, and Microsoft has replaced it with other email solutions. For users needing email in QB 2010, QB E-mail is a viable and free solution. QB 2010 also supports Microsoft Outlook. Intuit needed to address getting support for web-based email, not continuing support for an old program. Sometimes it’s tough to retire an old standby like Outlook Express, but keeping that functionality in a program adds to its size and slows its speed. It also creates support challenges to make sure a feature works for a group of users that is small and shrinking. Intuit has to make the tough decisions to drop support for obsolescent technology, and in this case, they made the right choice with Outlook Express. A better criticism of Intuit would be that they were slow to provide support for web-mail since they waited until QB 2011 do include that, but that is another story altogether.