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

The From field on an Odoo email template gets all the attention because it's the one clients actually notice: wrong name in their customer's inbox, easy to spot. The To field causes fewer complaints, but only because when it's wrong, mail just goes nowhere and nobody notices until a customer calls asking where their invoice is.

Where the From field is a layered fallback chain (salesperson, then company, then whoever's logged in), the To field mostly works a different way: a single checkbox called Default Recipients. When it's on, Odoo ignores any custom recipient logic on the template and just sends to whatever contact the record itself already points to. When it's off, the template has to say explicitly who the recipient is.

Same Example: Sales: Send Quotation

Pull up the same "Sales: Send Quotation" template from the From-field side of this, flip to its Settings tab, and the recipient side looks almost anticlimactic. Default Recipients is checked, and both of the fields that could override it, email_to and partner_to, are blank.

That's the whole rule for this template: the quote goes to the customer already attached to the quote. There's no chain to walk, because there's nothing to fall back from. A quote without a customer contact isn't a real quote. Contrast that with the From side, which has to guess between three different people who could plausibly be "the sender." The To side doesn't guess. It just points at the one relationship that has to exist for the record to make sense in the first place.

Most templates on this list work exactly the same way. The interesting ones are the handful that don't, where Odoo explicitly overrides the default, or where nothing is configured at all and some other piece of code has to supply the recipient at send time.

Every Template's To Field, Broken Down

Everything below is stock Odoo 19, pulled directly off a fresh install, no 19 Prince customization, grouped by app in the same order as the From-field breakdown: 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)

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 resolve their recipient list directly on `mailing.mailing`.

Marketing Automation

No `mail.template` records. Campaign activities resolve their own target audience, 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 inconsistency across Odoo's own connector modules is worth flagging directly. The Amazon connector turns Default Recipients off for its sync-failure templates, so the context-supplied alert address actually gets used. Lazada, Shopee, and TikTok ship the identical pattern but leave Default Recipients on, so their override never fires and mail falls back to whatever the default recipient resolution does for a system user instead. The code is the same across all four connectors, only Amazon's checkbox setting lets the override actually work. Not a 19 Prince customization, a genuine inconsistency in stock Odoo.

Two patterns are worth remembering here. First: when Default Recipients is checked, any hand-written email_to or partner_to value on the same template is dead weight. Odoo won't touch it. Second: the templates showing (none configured) aren't broken, they're just relying on whatever code fires the notification to supply the recipient directly, outside the template entirely. If you ever go looking for "where does this address come from" and the template comes up empty on all three fields, that's your signal to stop reading templates and go read the code that calls them.

— Darren from 19 Prince