The customer says no confirmation email arrived

You don't have to guess whether an email went out. The most common cause is a mistyped email address at checkout — steps 1 and 2 rule that out in under a minute. Every booking keeps a list of the messages sent for it, with a delivery status for each one.

Step 1 — Look at what was actually sent

1. Go to Bookings and open the booking.
2. Press Messages at the top of the page. This opens Sent Messages.
3. You get one row per message, with four columns: Type, To, Sent at and Status.

The Type column tells you which email it was:

• Booking Receipt — this is the booking confirmation, the email the customer is asking about.
• Payment — the payment email (a request to pay, not a receipt; see the last section).
• Membership confirmation — sent when someone buys a membership.
• A line such as Reminder 30 minutes before booking end — one of your reminder or follow-up emails.

If the dialog says No messages found for this booking., no email was ever created for this booking — jump to step 5.

Step 2 — Check the address in the To column

This is the most common real cause, and it costs you five seconds to rule out. Compare the address in To with what the customer tells you on the phone. Typos like .con, gmial, a missing letter or a stray space are routine at checkout, and the email will have gone out perfectly — to nobody.

If the address is wrong:

1. On the booking, use View customer profile on the customer card.
2. Correct the Email field and press Save.
3. Go back to the booking, open Messages, and use Send new message → Confirmation email. That sends a fresh confirmation to the corrected address.

Use Send new message rather than Resend after fixing an address. Resend re-sends to the address stored on that particular row — the old, wrong one.

Step 3 — Read the delivery status

Hover over the status to see the full history (on a phone, tap the row); the hints on screen say Hover over the status to see status history and Tap a message to see status history. The window is titled Status history.

Status	What it means	What to do
Pending	Scheduled, not sent yet. Sent at is empty.	Nothing — it's not due yet.
Queued	Handed over for sending, on its way out.	Wait a minute and refresh.
Sent	It left RentalBuddy and was accepted for delivery.	Usually fine; check again shortly.
Delivered	The customer's mail server accepted it. It arrived.	The mail is at their end — check spam (step 4).
Opened / Clicked	The customer opened it, or clicked a button in it.	It arrived and was read. Ask them to search their inbox.
Bounced	The receiving server rejected it. Almost always a wrong address or a full mailbox.	Go back to step 2.
Blocked	The receiving side refused to accept it.	Try a different address for the customer.
Spam	It was reported as spam.	Send the details another way; don't keep resending.
Unsubscribed	The recipient has unsubscribed.	Give them the booking details by phone or SMS.
Failed	The email could not be produced or sent.	Resend once; if it fails again, contact support.

A Delivered status does not guarantee the customer saw it — it only means their mail server took it. It can still be sitting in a spam folder.

Step 4 — Have them check spam, and tell them what to look for

Confirmation emails are sent from noreply@rentalbuddy.io, but the sender name shown in the inbox is your Company Name from your account settings. Customers searching for your business name in the wrong field often conclude nothing arrived.

Ask the customer to:

1. Search their mail app for rentalbuddy.io rather than your business name.
2. Check the spam/junk folder, and on Gmail also the Promotions tab.
3. Look at the subject line. The standard confirmation subject is "Thank you for your booking from" followed by your location name, unless you have changed it.

When spam is empty too — some providers block automated mail

Some email providers silently discard automated booking mail before it ever reaches the customer's folders. Operators have reported customers on certain providers — freenet.de is the recurring example — who never receive confirmations or codes even though the Status here reads Sent or Delivered and the spam folder is empty.

There is no setting on your side that fixes this. If the status looks fine (step 3) and the spam search came up empty, ask the customer for an alternative address with a different provider and send the confirmation there: correct the Email field on the customer profile and use Send new message, exactly as in step 2. Resend would go to the same address at the same provider, so it cannot help here.

Step 5 — Resend it, or check whether the email is switched on at all

To resend:

• Resend (the arrow icon on a row) re-sends that exact message to the address on that row. You'll see Sent! or Failed — try again. Note that pressing Resend currently also sends a fresh confirmation to the customer's current address, so the customer may end up with two emails.
• Send new message builds a new email now and sends it to the customer's current address. Choose Confirmation email or Payment email. You'll see Email sent successfully! or Failed to send email — try again.

If Sent Messages was empty, the confirmation email may be switched off or restricted to other locations:

1. Go to Settings → Email Settings.
2. Under Default emails, find the row whose Trigger reads When the booking is created. That is your confirmation email; the Subject column shows its current subject line.
3. Check the Active column. The tooltip is explicit: "If Active is turned off this email will not be sent out to customers."
4. Check the Location column. If it lists specific locations instead of All locations, bookings at other locations get no confirmation.

The full tour of these settings is in Edit your confirmation email and set up reminders.

You are also offered the confirmation email at the moment you register a payment manually on a booking: a small Send Confirmation Email dialog appears with Yes and No. Answering No there is a quiet way to end up with a booking that never got its confirmation.

"They got it twice" — and who else gets a copy

Copies to your own team are subject-prefixed with Copy:, so a duplicate that starts with Copy: is the operator copy, not a second customer email.

To change who receives those copies:

1. Go to Settings → Account.
2. Find Account Contact E-mail. The helper text explains it: "Add one or more addresses. Booking confirmation copies are sent to each address when enabled." Use Add contact email and Remove contact email to manage the list.
3. Directly below is the switch Send booking confirmation email copies to Account Contact E-mail. Turn it off if you no longer want a copy of every booking.

If the customer genuinely received two identical, non-Copy: emails, it is usually because the confirmation was resent — check the Sent Messages list for two rows with the same Type.

Booking confirmation vs payment receipt — two different things

Operators ask about this constantly, so to be clear:

• The booking confirmation is RentalBuddy's email. It is the row shown as Booking Receipt in Sent Messages, it contains the booking details and the buttons the customer needs (such as Start booking), and you edit it under Settings → Email Settings, in the dialog titled Email settings (Confirmation email).
• The Payment email in RentalBuddy is not a receipt either. It is a request to pay — its standard subject is "Your booking at [location] needs to be paid" and it carries a payment link. You send it when a booking is still unpaid.
• A card payment receipt comes from Stripe, not from RentalBuddy. It is not listed in Sent Messages, you cannot resend it from the booking, and whether it is sent at all is controlled in your Stripe Dashboard. If a customer wants proof of payment for their accounts, that is the document to point them at.

So "the customer got the receipt but not the confirmation" is a normal, explainable situation: two systems, two emails.

If none of this helped

Contact support with the booking number and the address shown in the To column, and say what the Status said. That is everything needed to trace it.