Emails¶

pretalx sends emails on your behalf at several points in the event lifecycle: when a speaker submits a proposal, when you accept or reject sessions, when you release a schedule, and whenever you compose a message to a group of speakers.

The Outbox¶

The single most important concept in pretalx’s email system is the outbox. Almost every email pretalx generates on your behalf lands here first, as a draft, rather than being sent immediately. This gives you the chance to review, edit, or discard emails before they reach anyone.

The only exceptions are:

Submission confirmations: When a speaker submits a proposal, the acknowledgement email is sent immediately, because speakers expect instant feedback that their submission went through.
Team emails: Emails to your team members and reviewers are always sent directly (see composing emails below).

Everything else – acceptance emails, rejection emails, schedule notifications, speaker invitations, and all messages you compose – goes to the outbox first. You can find it under Your event → Mails → Outbox, where a badge in the sidebar shows the number of pending (unsent) emails.

Why the outbox?¶

Queuing emails before sending has several advantages:

Review before sending: You can read each email, fix typos, adjust wording for a specific speaker, or add a personal note before it goes out.
Batch control: When you accept or reject 50 proposals, you get 50 draft emails in your outbox. You can send them all at once when you are ready, or hold them back while you finalise your programme.
Safe corrections: Changed your mind about a rejection? Just delete the email from the outbox – the speaker will never know.

Working with the outbox¶

The outbox list shows each pending email with its subject, recipients, and related proposals. You can open and edit all fields of an unsent email, including the subject, body, Reply-To, CC and BCC headers.

You can filter the list by track or search for recipients, email addresses or subjects. You can send all unsent emails, and if you have previously applied filters, only the visible, matching emails are sent. This is useful if you want to send acceptance emails for one track at a time, for example.

Discarding all or some emails works the same way as sending them. You can also send or discard an individual email by clicking the buttons next to it.

Email Templates¶

Email templates define the default text for emails that pretalx generates automatically. You manage templates under Your event → Mails → Templates.

Built-in templates¶

pretalx creates the following templates for every new event:

Acknowledge proposal submission: Sent immediately when a speaker submits a proposal. Confirms receipt and links to the proposal page.
Proposal accepted: Generated when you accept a proposal. Contains a confirmation link for the speaker to confirm their attendance (see session lifecycle).
Proposal rejected: Generated when you reject a proposal.
Add a speaker to a proposal (new account): Sent when you add a speaker whose email address is not yet known to pretalx. Contains a link to set up their account.
Add a speaker to a proposal (existing account): Sent when you add a speaker who already has a pretalx account. Links to the proposal page.
Custom fields reminder: Used when you send reminders for unanswered custom fields (see custom fields).
Draft proposal reminder: Used when you send reminders to speakers who started a proposal but never submitted it.
New schedule published: Generated when you release a new schedule version and choose to notify speakers (see scheduling).

You can edit any built-in template to match your event’s tone and branding.

Custom templates¶

You can create additional templates for emails you send regularly – for example, a “Please upload your slides” reminder or a “Speaker dinner invitation”. Custom templates appear in the template list alongside the built-in ones, and can be used as starting points in the email composer.

You can use any of your templates as a starting point in the composer. In the template list, click the “Compose” button next to a template to open the composer with that template’s subject and text pre-filled. You can then adjust the text and select your recipients.

Note

Changing a template does not affect emails that are already in the outbox. Those emails contain the rendered text from the moment they were generated. If you need to update pending emails, discard them from the outbox and regenerate them.

Placeholders¶

Placeholders are dynamic values enclosed in curly braces, like {proposal_title} or {event_name}. When pretalx generates an email from a template, each placeholder is replaced with the actual value for the recipient and proposal.

You can use placeholders in both the subject and body of a template. Using a placeholder that is not available for a given template will result in an error when the email is generated.

Placeholders range from simple values like {event_name} or {proposal_title} to more complex ones like {confirmation_link} (a URL the speaker clicks to confirm their attendance), {all_reviews} (all review texts for a proposal, separated by dividers – useful for sharing reviewer feedback in acceptance or rejection emails), or {speaker_schedule_full} (a formatted list of all the speaker’s scheduled sessions with times and rooms).

The template editor shows which placeholders are available for the template you are editing, grouped by category. Click the question mark next to a placeholder to see an explanation and a preview of what it will look like in a real email. Some built-in templates have additional role-specific placeholders that only appear when editing that template.

If you choose to copy a previous event’s settings when setting up your new event, email templates will be copied to the new event, which is why you may want to use a placeholder like {event_name} – this way, when your next event rolls around, you will not have to update the event name in all of your email templates.

Composing Emails¶

The email composer lets you write and send emails to groups of speakers, submitters, or team members. You can find it under Your event → Mails → Compose emails.

When you open the composer, you choose one of two modes:

Sessions, proposals, speakers

Send emails to speakers based on their proposals. You can filter recipients by proposal state (submitted, accepted, confirmed, rejected, withdrawn), session type, track, content locale, and tags. You can also select specific proposals or speakers to include regardless of the filters.

If you have a custom field, you can filter by custom field responses too – navigate to a submission list filtered by a custom field response, and use the “Send email” button there.

This mode supports all placeholders, so each speaker receives a personalised email with their proposal details filled in.

Reviewers and team members

Send emails to your team. Select one or more teams as recipients. These emails are always sent directly (they do not go through the outbox), because they are internal communication rather than speaker-facing messages.

Preview and deduplication¶

Before sending, click Preview email to see a rendered preview of the email with sample values for all placeholders. The preview also shows the approximate number of recipients.

The number of recipients is only approximate because, when you send an email to a group of speakers, pretalx deduplicates automatically: if a speaker has multiple proposals that match your filters, and the rendered email text is identical for each (for example because you do not mention the session title), they receive only one copy of the email. The email is still linked to all matching proposals in the outbox.

Sending directly vs. sending to the outbox¶

By default, composed emails are placed in the outbox for review. If you want to send them right away, check Send immediately. There is no further confirmation step after this, so be very sure that you are happy with the email content and are sure you have selected the correct group of recipients!

Sent Emails¶

All sent emails are recorded under Your event → Mails → Sent emails, where you can search and filter them just like the outbox. You can also click Copy to draft on any sent email to create a new draft based on it, which is useful for follow-up messages or corrections. The draft will use the original template (with placeholders intact), not the rendered text that was sent, so you can re-personalise the message for different recipients.

Email Settings¶

You configure email settings under Your event → Settings → Mail.

Reply-To address: The email address that recipients see as the reply-to address. If left empty, your event’s main email address is used. Note that only the Reply-To header can be configured – the From header is always set to the pretalx server’s sending address. Emails that claim to be From: a different domain than the one actually sending them are routinely flagged as spam or rejected outright by receiving mail servers. If you need emails to originate from your own domain, configure a custom mail server (see below).
Subject prefix: A short label prepended in [brackets] to all outgoing email subjects, helping recipients filter emails by event. By default, pretalx uses your event’s name as the prefix. If you or a plugin manually add a bracketed prefix to a template or composed email, pretalx detects this and skips the automatic prefix so that emails never end up with duplicate [brackets].
Signature: Text appended to every outgoing email. pretalx automatically inserts the standard signature separator above it. You can use Markdown formatting in the signature.

Custom email server¶

By default, pretalx sends emails through the server configured by your instance administrator. If you want emails to originate from your own domain, you can configure a custom SMTP server under the mail settings.

When a custom server is configured, all event-related emails are routed through it – acceptance and rejection notifications, composed messages, schedule updates, and so on. The only exception is password reset and recovery emails, which always use the system mail server, because user accounts are valid across all events on the instance, not tied to a single event.

Make sure your mail server is functional and reliable before enabling it. Misconfigured or unreliable servers can cause speakers to miss important emails with no indication to you that delivery failed. Use the Test button to verify your settings, and monitor your server’s delivery logs after switching over.

Email Deliverability¶

When you accept or reject a large number of proposals at once, pretalx generates one email per speaker. Sending hundreds of emails in a short window can damage your sending domain’s reputation with email providers, causing future emails to land in spam or be rejected outright.

This is especially problematic when using a custom email server, because you are fully responsible for your domain’s reputation, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, IP warm-up, and bounce handling.

A few things you can do to protect your reputation:

Spread your sends: Rather than sending all acceptance and rejection emails at the same time, use the outbox filters to send by track or session type across several hours or even days.
Check your DNS records: Make sure your domain has correct SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Your email provider can usually help you with this.
Monitor bounces: If you see a lot of bounced emails, investigate before sending more.

Note

If you use pretalx.com, email deliverability is handled for you. We maintain the sending infrastructure, monitor reputation, manage DNS records, and handle bounces automatically. We also route emails through specialised providers depending on the recipient to ensure the best possible delivery rates – for example, certain large email providers require specific sending paths that we maintain on your behalf.