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New Settings → Emails is where you choose who guest emails come from, control which moments send, rewrite their opening and closing lines in your own voice, and brand them — colours, a logo, a banner image, and each experience’s own photo. Riserva delivers the mail for you — there is no provider account to create and no API key to paste. The Delivery card’s Guest email badge reads Sending when delivery is live. (If it ever reads Log only, delivery isn’t configured: every email is still written to the reservation’s timeline, it just isn’t delivered — contact Riserva support.)

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1. Who the email comes from

A reply-to address is worth setting — guests reply to confirmations far more often than people expect, and Riserva’s sending address isn’t a mailbox anyone at your winery reads.

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2. Send from your own address (optional)

Out of the box, guest email goes out from Riserva’s sending address, which is perfectly deliverable. If you’d rather guests saw reservations@yourwinery.com, connect it here. It takes one DNS change. Connect it
  1. Under Custom sending address, type the address you want to send from into Sending address — e.g. reservations@yourwinery.com. It must be at a domain you control; Gmail, Outlook and the like can’t be used.
  2. Press Connect domain.
  3. Riserva shows you a short list of DNS records — a Type, a Host, a Value, and sometimes a Priority.
  4. Add each one at whoever manages your domain’s DNS (your registrar, Cloudflare, your web agency). Paste the Host exactly as shown: these names are relative to your domain, so send becomes send.yourwinery.com on its own.
  5. Come back and press Check verification.
While you wait, nothing breaks. Guest email keeps going out from Riserva’s address until your domain is verified — the card says so, in those words. DNS usually propagates in minutes; it can take up to 72 hours. When it verifies, the badge turns Verified, the records disappear, and the card reads Sends from reservations@yourwinery.com. That’s the address on every confirmation, reminder and cancellation from then on.
Good to know Remove stops Riserva using your address and puts guests back on Riserva’s, immediately. It does not undo your DNS records, and you don’t need to delete them — if you reconnect the same address later it picks up where it left off, already verified.
Why bother? Your own address is the difference between a guest recognising the sender and not. It also puts your domain’s reputation behind your reservation mail. It is genuinely optional — plenty of wineries never do it, and their email arrives fine.

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3. Rewrite what the emails say

Under Content, pick an email and rewrite its Opening lines (the paragraph under the heading) and Closing lines (the last thing the guest reads). Leave either blank to keep Riserva’s wording. Press Enter for a new paragraph. Two things never change, on purpose:
  • The greeting stays. Riserva always writes “Hi Marguerite,” itself, so your text is personal without you managing name tags.
  • The facts stay. Date, time, party, confirmation code and location live in the details card, which your words can’t touch. A rewrite changes how the email reads, never what it says.
The team alert (New reservation alert) isn’t rewritable — it’s addressed to your own staff and its first line is the information. There’s one more piece of wording, and it lives on the experience, not here: each experience’s Good to know (emails) field (on its page under Experiences) — arrival details, parking, dress code. It appears in that experience’s confirmation, reminder and update emails as its own little section.

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4. Brand the design

Emails are one 600px column. That’s fixed — no email client can be trusted with more. Inside it, you control: Every colour has a swatch you can click to open a picker — or type/paste a hex code if you have exact brand colours. Uploads go to your store’s files (Content → Files in Shopify), and the image only takes effect when you save — the toast reminds you.
Good to know Some email clients block images, so every email is written to read perfectly without them. Don’t put anything essential inside an image. Colours must be hex values like #6B2233. Anything Riserva can’t read falls back to the default palette rather than producing a broken email, and image URLs must be full https:// addresses.

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5. Preview it, then send yourself a test

The Preview & test section shows the real email — not a mock-up — updating live as you type anywhere on the page. Two pickers control it:
  • Email — any touchpoint, including ones you’ve rewritten.
  • Experience — pick one of yours and the preview becomes exactly what a guest of that experience receives: its photo as the banner, its real add-ons, a date its schedule actually offers, its price on the money emails (a private buyout shows its flat price, not price-per-guest). Sample reservation shows a generic example instead.
Expand preview opens it full-size, with a Desktop / Mobile toggle — Mobile is the genuine phone rendering, not a shrunken desktop one. Then enter an address under Send to and press Send test. Riserva sends the email and experience you’ve selected, using your saved settings. Three outcomes:
  • “Test email sent to …” — it worked. Check the inbox, and the spam folder if it’s not there.
  • “Logged, not sent” — delivery isn’t configured for this store (a dev store, usually), so the message was rendered and recorded rather than delivered.
  • “The provider rejected the message” — the banner shows the delivery provider’s own words.
Good to know The test uses saved settings, not what’s currently on screen. If you’ve just typed changes, save first — the help text under the field tells you when unsaved changes are being left out. Connecting or removing a custom sending address is not a saved-with-the-bar change: those buttons act immediately.

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6. Choose which emails send

Under Notifications (at the bottom of the page — you’ll set these once and rarely return) every touchpoint has a switch, aligned with its name:
  • Reservation confirmed
  • Pre-visit reminder
  • Reservation cancelled
  • Payment failed
  • Reservation rescheduled
  • Payment due
  • New reservation alert
  • Waitlist — table ready
Every one is on to start with. A winery that never opens this page still gets confirmations. Under each name, one line says when that email goes out. Payment due carries a Not sending yet badge: it’s written but nothing triggers it yet, so its switch changes nothing today. See Customer emails. New reservation alert goes to your team, not guests, when a reservation is made online. Under it is an Alert addresses field: type up to five addresses, separated by commas. Leave it empty and no alert is sent. The field saves with the rest of the page, and greys out while the alert’s switch is off. See Customer emails. Each touchpoint also has a Subject line field. Leave it blank to keep Riserva’s own subject (shown in the field as a hint). Fill it in to override. Switching a touchpoint off greys its subject field out rather than hiding it, so you can always see what the switch governs.
Good to know Turning an email off doesn’t make Riserva go quiet. It still records on the reservation’s timeline that the moment happened and the email was skipped, so a guest asking “did you send me anything?” has an answer.

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Saving

Like every settings page in Riserva, changes are saved from the bar that appears at the top of the screen when you edit something — there are no per-card save buttons. A confirmation toast appears when it’s done.
What things mean on this screen: What things mean: Settings