--- title: 'How to send your invitations by email' description: 'Getting a hundred invitations into a hundred inboxes without landing in spam, and what to write in the message itself.' source: 'https://envelope.love/blog/send-invitations-by-email' category: 'Sending' published: '2026-05-02' updated: '2026-05-02' --- # How to send your invitations by email Getting a hundred invitations into a hundred inboxes without landing in spam, and what to write in the message itself. This is the plain markdown copy of https://envelope.love/blog/send-invitations-by-email, published by Love Envelope for machine readers. The page itself carries the same words. Email is still where invitations are actually opened. A message sits in an inbox until it is dealt with, it is searchable months later, and it reaches the guests who are not on any messaging app. It also has more ways to go quietly wrong than any other method, so here is how to do it properly. ## Collect the addresses before you need them This is the whole job, and it is best done months early, at the save the date stage or when the guest list is being written. Ask one person per household rather than everybody, ask by message rather than in a group, and put the answers straight into your list rather than leaving them in a conversation. For older relatives, ask a family member who is likely to know. This is also the point where you find out who does not use email at all, which is worth knowing early. See [inviting the guests who are not online](https://envelope.love/blog/guests-who-are-not-online). ## Send it from something that looks like you An invitation arriving from a personal address, with your names in the sender line, is opened. One from a generic no reply address is not, and a proportion of them never arrive at all. The two things that matter most for delivery: - The sender name should be your names, not a company or a product - Replies should come back to you, so that a guest who hits reply is talking to a person ## Do not attach anything A PDF attachment is the single worst way to send an invitation. It is the format spam filters are most suspicious of, it looks wrong on a phone, and half the recipients will never open it. Send the invitation itself in the message, with a link to open the full thing. The guest sees something the moment they open the email rather than being asked to download a file first. ## What to write in the message Short. The invitation is the document, the email is the envelope. > Sarah and Thomas are getting married on the twelfth of September, and we would love you there. Everything is on the invitation below, including how to let us know. Three things it must contain: who it is from, what the date is, and one obvious thing to press. Anything else is competing with the invitation itself. ## Subject lines that get opened - Names and the fact of it. "Sarah and Thomas are getting married" - Or the plainest possible statement. "Our wedding invitation" Avoid anything that reads as marketing. No exclamation marks, no "you are invited" in capitals, no emoji in the subject. Those are the patterns filters are trained on. ## Send in one go, not one at a time Sending a hundred separate emails by hand takes an evening, produces a hundred chances to paste the wrong name, and looks to a mail provider very much like somebody working through a list. Sending them properly, as one action, is faster and lands better. It also gives you a record of who was sent what, which is the thing you will want in six weeks when you are working out who has not replied. ## Then check what happened Two things are worth looking at a day later. - **Bounces.** An address that did not exist. Usually a typo, occasionally an old work address. Fix and resend - **Silence from a whole household.** Worth a message rather than an assumption What you cannot honestly know is whether an email was read. Anybody claiming to tell you that is guessing, and the guessing is done with a tracking pixel. What you can see is whether the invitation itself was opened, which is a much better signal. [Reading your invitation statistics](https://envelope.love/blog/reading-your-invitation-statistics) covers the difference. ## Follow up in the same thread When the reply deadline gets close, reply to your own original message rather than starting a new one. The invitation is right there underneath, and the guest does not have to go looking for it. The wording for that nudge is in [the guests who never reply](https://envelope.love/blog/guests-who-never-reply). For guests who live in a messaging app rather than an inbox, [sending your invitation on WhatsApp](https://envelope.love/blog/send-invitations-on-whatsapp) is the companion piece. --- Make yours. Six designs, your own words, and one link to send. Free to build, free for a day once it is live. Start an invitation: https://envelope.love/create