How email works in PMFriend

What's in it for the business

The shared inbox first-pass — read, sort, match the sender, decide what's maintenance — eats about an hour a day. AI classification and tenant matching do that pass for you: ~10 staff-hours a month back per PM, and an urgent report emailed at 11pm is triaged before anyone sits down in the morning. Indicative figures; every portfolio differs.

PMFriend uses email in two directions: incoming (tenants emailing your support address turn into maintenance drafts) and outgoing (notifications, confirmations, occasional digests). Both are designed so you don't have to think about deliverability or DNS — just point your existing support inbox at us once and we handle the rest.

What your tenants see

Your tenants don't change anything. They keep emailing the support address they already have on file (e.g. support@your-agency.com.au). You set up a one-time forwarding rule on that mailbox to PMFriend's intake address, which we generate for you when you sign up.

Every email arriving at the intake address is:

1. Auto-classified by AI — is this maintenance? what category? how urgent? where in the property?
2. Surfaced as a draft in your Email Inbox tab inside Maintenance, ready for one-click promotion to a real maintenance request, or
3. Archived if it's clearly not maintenance (a rent query, newsletter, off-topic forward).

Your tenant never has to learn a new address, install an app, or remember a portal login. The friction stays at zero on their side.

What gets emailed out

The platform sends transactional email for these flows:

• Pilot application confirmation — when an agency principal applies via the public form, they get a "we got it, talk soon" confirmation, and we get a heads-up notification.
• Welcome email — when an agency signs up, the admin gets a short setup guide pointing at email-intake setup, CSV imports, and team invites.
• Password reset — request a reset, follow the link, confirm with a "your password was changed" email so suspicious activity is obvious.
• Team invite — when a PM invites a colleague, the colleague gets an "Accept invite" email with a one-click link. The PM also sees the URL in the dashboard as a fallback if the invite gets lost.
• Owner digest — the digest you draft on the Owner page is sent via email when you click Send. Plaintext-first so it lands cleanly in any inbox.
• Contractor magic-link — when you assign a contractor to a work order or issue them a magic link from the Contractors page, an email goes out automatically with the secure URL the contractor uses to view the job, update status, and upload photos. No more copy-pasting the link into SMS.
• Owner approval request — when a quote exceeds the owner's pre-approved threshold, the property's primary owner gets an email with the scope, contractor, and estimate, asking them to reply to you with their decision. They no longer need to be logged in to see the request.
• Tenant maintenance status updates — the tenant who reported the issue is kept in the loop with three short emails: "we've received your report" (after triage), "a contractor is on their way" (after dispatch), and "the job is complete" (after the contractor marks done). Each one points the tenant back to you for follow-up questions.

We deliberately don't fire automated marketing emails, drip sequences, or reminder spam. Every email we send is in response to a specific action a person took.

Sender identity

Outbound mail comes from support@pmfriend.com, signed with DKIM and DMARC-aligned. Recipients see PMFriend in the From: line; this is by design so a tenant who later forwards a notification to their agent sees a verifiable PMFriend brand.

If your agency hits Scale tier and wants white-label outbound (mail sent from your own your-agency.com.au domain), that's a roadmap feature — speak to support.

Unsubscribe

Every email we send carries a per-recipient unsubscribe link in the footer. Clicking it adds the address to a global suppression list and nothing further is ever sent to that address from PMFriend, regardless of which agency might try to write to it.

The unsubscribe link works for the lifetime of the address; we use it ourselves to verify the suppression flow.

Mail clients like Gmail and Apple Mail surface a native one-click "Unsubscribe" button (the RFC 8058 standard); we wire that too. So tenants can opt out from inside their inbox, no website visit needed.

Spam protection

Three layers protect both your agency's reputation and our intake infrastructure:

1. Sender allowlist — emails arriving from senders we have on file as your tenants flow straight to AI classification. Senders we don't recognise land in an "Unresolved" queue for you to triage manually.
2. Rate limiting — even if a misbehaving forwarder accidentally pointed a mailing list at the intake address, the AI classifier is capped at 100 calls per agency per day. Above that, classification falls back to keyword-matching (less precise but free), so your AI bill is bounded.
3. AI-as-spam-filter — the AI explicitly classifies non-maintenance content (newsletters, unsolicited mail) and archives it without surfacing as a draft.

Privacy posture

You can confidently tell tenants and owners:

• We send only the subject and plaintext body of an inbound email to the AI classifier (Anthropic Claude). Sender address, recipient address, and agency identifiers stay in our Sydney database and never leave the box.
• We don't sell, share, or repurpose email contents.
• Suppression decisions (unsubscribes) are global to PMFriend, not per-agency, so a person who has opted out is honoured permanently.
• Our pmfriend.com domain is signed with DKIM and publishes DMARC reports we monitor weekly.

Setup steps for your agency

1. Settings → Email intake — copy your unique intake address.
2. Forwarding rule on your existing support mailbox (Office 365, Gmail Workspace, or cPanel — instructions for each are on the same Settings page).
3. Test — email yourself at the intake address; the message should appear in the Email Inbox tab within seconds.
4. First mail from a tenant lands in either Drafts (if their sender email is on file) or Unresolved (if not). Resolving an Unresolved row remembers the sender's address as that tenant's alias for future mail.

That's it. Five-minute setup, then it runs forever.

What's coming

The remaining email-side roadmap items:

• Owner one-click approval URLs — the owner approval email is informational today; the owner replies to the PM. A direct approval / rejection portal (signed link, no login) is planned once a paid customer asks for it.
• Threaded conversations — when a tenant replies to a status update, the reply attaches to the existing draft / request rather than creating a new one.
• Email verification at signup — strengthens new-account integrity.
• Bounce + complaint auto-suppression — hard-bounces and ISP complaints currently need manual handling; webhook wiring is planned.

See the Roadmap for status.