Odoo 19 Email Templates: How the 'From' Field Actually Works

Every Odoo project I've run eventually hits the same moment: a client asks why an invoice or a quote showed up in their customer's inbox from the wrong person. Not a bounce, not a spam filter. The email arrived fine, it just said "From: Dave" when Dave had nothing to do with it. Nobody configured that. Odoo just decided.

The reason is that Odoo doesn't treat "who sent this email" as one field you fill in. It's a fallback chain: a short list of candidates, checked top to bottom, and the first one with an actual email address wins. Untangling which candidate wins on which template is most of the work of getting Odoo's outbound email right for a client.

Example - Sales: Send Quotation

Here's the actual expression Odoo 19 ships on the standard "Sales: Send Quotation" template, the one that fires when someone clicks Send on a quote:

{{ (object.user_id.email_formatted or object.company_id.email_formatted or user.email_formatted) }}

Read left to right, that's three checks, in order:

1. object.user_id.email_formatted: is there a salesperson assigned to this quote, and do they have an email on file? If yes, they're the sender.
2. object.company_id.email_formatted: if not, does the company itself have an email address configured? If yes, the customer sees the company brand as sender instead of a person.
3. user.email_formatted: if neither of those resolved to anything, fall back to whoever is actually logged in and clicking Send.

The "or" here doesn't mean "any of these." It means first-match-wins. Odoo checks candidate one, and only moves to candidate two if candidate one comes back empty. That's the entire mental model for reading any of these expressions: read it as a waterfall, not a set.

That same shape (salesperson, then company, then logged-in user, with small variations) repeats across almost every customer-facing template Odoo ships. A few skip a step. One template runs the order backwards. None of it is arbitrary once you know to look for the chain.

Every Template's From Field, Broken Down

Everything below is stock Odoo 19, pulled directly off a fresh install, no 19 Prince customization, grouped by app: Sales, Accounting, CRM, Purchasing, Inventory, Helpdesk, Project, Documents, everything else, then Connectors (Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, and Gelato, grouped together at the end).

Sales

Sales (sale)

Subscriptions (sale_subscription)

eCommerce (website_sale)

Accounting

Accounting (account)

Follow-up (account_followup)

Worked example: unlike the field chains above, the Follow-up templates use a method call instead of a simple field lookup — {{ object._get_followup_responsible().email_formatted }}. Three pieces, left to right: object is the customer record the reminder is about; _get_followup_responsible() is a method, not a stored field, so Odoo runs actual logic to work out who owns collections for that customer; .email_formatted formats whatever comes back as "Name <email>", the same as every other From field on this page. Notably, there's no or fallback chain here — if the method can't resolve anyone, the From field just comes back empty.

Bank Synchronization (account_online_synchronization)

Peppol E-Invoicing (account_peppol)

Accounting Reports (account_reports)

CRM

Lead Mining (crm_iap_mine)

Resellers / Partner Assignment (website_crm_partner_assign)

Purchasing

Purchase (purchase)

Inventory

Inventory (stock)

Email Marketing

No `mail.template` records. Mass mailings compose their body/sender directly on `mailing.mailing`.

Marketing Automation

No `mail.template` records. Campaign activities compose their content directly, not through templates.

Helpdesk

Helpdesk (helpdesk)

Project

Project (project)

Field Service (industry_fsm)

Documents

Documents (documents)

Payroll Documents (documents_hr_payroll)

Everything Else

Appointments (appointment)

Appointments - Recruitment Scheduling (appointment_hr_recruitment)

Appraisals (hr_appraisal)

Appraisals - 360 Feedback (hr_appraisal_survey)

Calendar (calendar)

eLearning (website_slides)

eLearning - Certification (website_slides_survey)

Equity (equity)

Events (event)

Events - Website Track (website_event_track)

Gamification (gamification)

Loyalty & Gift Cards (loyalty)

Lunch (lunch)

Payroll (hr_payroll)

Planning (planning)

Point of Sale (point_of_sale)

Point of Sale - Self-Order (pos_self_order)

Recruitment (hr_recruitment)

Salary Configurator (hr_contract_salary)

Settings - Module Install Requests (base_install_request)

Settings - Portal & Sign-Up (auth_signup)

Settings - Two-Factor Authentication (auth_totp_mail)

Settings - IAP Extract Notification (iap_extract)

Surveys (survey)

Sustainability Reporting / CSRD (esg_csrd)

Timesheets (timesheet_grid)

Website - AI Site Generator (website_generator)

Website - Forum Profile (website_profile)

Developer/QA - Mail Test (test_mail)

Connectors

Amazon Connector (sale_amazon)

Gelato Connector (sale_gelato)

Lazada Connector (sale_lazada)

Shopee Connector (sale_shopee)

TikTok Connector (sale_tiktok)

One row in the CRM section is worth calling out on its own. The "Lead Forward: Send to partner" template sends from whoever is logged in and forwarding the lead, with no fallback to the company or anyone else. That's the exact "quote creator is the sender" pattern that comes up whenever a client complains about the wrong name showing up in a customer's inbox. Odoo already ships that fix, it just lives on one CRM lead-forwarding template, not on the Sales quotation flow where most people go looking for it.

If your customers have ever asked "why did this come from someone who doesn't work here anymore," the answer is almost always sitting in one of these rows. Fixing it isn't a rebuild. It's usually a one-line change to the right template, once you know which candidate in the chain is actually winning.

— Darren from 19 Prince