Email Timezones and Timestamps

Setting Timezones for Emails

Overview

Recurly's timezone for emails feature provides you full control to set a unique timezone specifically for the emails sent to your customer accounts. You can set an email timezone on the Site Settings page, which will then be applied to all of your customer accounts. Additionally, you can set an email timezone on each Account. If a customer Account has a unique email timezone specifically applied to their account, that setting will override the email timezone configured from Site Settings. Account-level email timezones can also be configured via the API. This will help ensure your varying customers receive email content sent via the Recurly App in their corresponding timezones, alleviating confusion of time/date stamp discrepancies between the Recurly "out-of-the-box" UTC email timezone provided for email content versus the appropriate timezone to reflect the customer's location.

Please Note!

It is important to note that this feature does not change the time an email is sent. Emails will still be sent as they are configured by trigger actions such as creating a subscription, making a purchase, receiving a refund, etc. This feature focuses on placing the source of truth for a customer's timezone within the email content itself, dynamically reflecting each unique customer's email timezone set to their account leveraging the email template parameters detailed in this documentation.

Example

Merchant 123 Inc. is located in New York, New York, with customer account Alex Smith based out of London, England. When the merchant sets Alex Smith's email timezone to GMT, that customer will now see the timezone/stamps associated with their subscription within an email reflected accurately, eliminating confusion around what day and time their subscription is intended to renew. 123 Inc. has the flexibility to set unique email timezones for each of their customer accounts, no matter where in the world they are located!

How to Configure Timezones and Timestamps for Emails via Recurly Admin UI.

On the “Site Settings” page, you are provided an option to set a time zone/time stamp for Emails at the bottom of the “Email Settings” section. The initial default option for all accounts site-wide is UTC. With this configuration, you can select any timezone from the dropdown to apply to all emails sent to all customers within your site.

You can also set a custom email timestamp/timezone for individual customers at the “Account” level. If an email time zone is selected for a specific customer on their account, Recurly App will prioritize that timezone over the site-wide email timezone configured on the “Site Setting” page.

If at any point you wish to remove a custom email time zone from a specific Account, you can select the "Site Settings (Default)" radio button and save your changes.

Site-Level Email Timezone Configuration

Configuring an email timezone/timestamp at the Site level will immediately send each email to each customer in the timezone you selected on this page. You can also set a custom email timezone at the Account-level, which will override the Site-level configured email timezone for a specific Account.

If you at any point wish to remove an Account-level custom email timezone, you can select the Site-level email timezone button on the account page and save your changes.

Account-Level Email Timezone Configuration

Configuring an email time zone at the Account-level will ensure that all emails the specific Account receives will contain the time zone and time stamp you applied to the given Account.

If you at any point wish to remove an Account-level custom email timezone, you can select the Site-level email time zone button on the account page and save your changes.

Additional email parameters

You can add the parameters below to your email templates within the Email Templates page in Recurly App.

• transaction_date_and_time
  Transaction Date and Time (adjusted for timezone)
• transaction_declined?
  Show if given transaction was declined.
• transaction_success?
  Show if given transaction was successful.
• transaction_voided?
  Show if given transaction was voided.
• subscription_expires_at_with_time
  Date and Time (adjusted for timezone) when the subscription expires if the subscription has been canceled.
• subscription_trial_ends_at_with_time
  Date and time (adjusted for timezone) when the current subscription trial period ends.

Setting Account-specific Email Timezones via API

Supported API IANA Time Zone Names

The Account API accepts the following IANA time zone values for preferred_time_zone: