--- title: Settings - Emails --- > Agent instructions: > **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown. > > - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version. > - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt). | General | | | --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Email encoding | Sets the character encoding used for emails sent by the system. By default, UTF-8 is used. It is recommended to leave the default encoding unless you encounter issues with extended characters in your emails. | | Email format | Format used for email messages. You can choose between _HTML_ and _Plain text_. If _Both_ is selected and an email template has both formats defined, HTML will be used for the email text and plain text will be included as an attachment. | | Email processing | | | Enable emails | If checked, email sending will be enabled. You can temporarily disable sending of emails by clearing this check-box, e.g. when performing administration tasks. | | Enable email queue | If enabled, the system uses an email queue when [sending emails](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/managing-users/sending-emails.md). This allows advanced email processing and resending of mails that are lost due to errors. If disabled, emails are sent directly to the SMTP server.
Using the email queue is highly recommended when sending out large amounts of emails over a short amount of time (email campaigns or other types of mass emails). | | Batch size | Sets the maximum number of emails that the system loads from the email queue in one batch when sending emails to SMTP servers. The emails are then distributed one-by-one to the available servers. If the specified value is smaller than the total amount of emails to be sent from the queue, the system loads a new batch and continues the process.
The value of the batch size affects the number and frequency of **database queries**. Set an appropriate value if you wish to optimize the email sending for your environment. If you set a very large batch size, the system needs to process a large volume of data at one time, which may consume a lot of memory. Using a smaller batch size increases the number and frequency of queries and may reduce the database performance.
This setting affects all sites in the system, so it is only available if the _(global)_ option is selected from the **Site** drop‑down list. | | Archive emails (days) | Sent emails will be stored by the email queue for the number of days specified here. Such emails may be viewed in the **Email queue** application on the **Sent emails** tab.
If set to _0_, emails will not be archived. | | Default SMTP server | | | SMTP server | The [SMTP server](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/configuring-kentico/configuring-smtp-servers.md) specified here will be used as the default option when sending emails. Depending on the value selected in the **Site** drop‑down list, the server will either be dedicated to a single website, or will be designated as a global server (i.e. it will accept emails from all sites in the system and also handle mails that are not related to any specific website).
This field must contain the domain name or IP address of the server. If the connection to the server should use a different port than _25_, please include it in the name. Enter _localhost_ if you wish to use the server provided by your local machine.
You can define additional servers that will be used if this one is busy in the **SMTP servers** application. | | SMTP server user | If the server requires authentication, you can enter the user name here. | | SMTP server password | If the server requires authentication, you can enter the password here.
**Note**: After you enter and save a password, the field always displays 8 "masking" characters, even if the password is longer or shorter. This measure helps protect your password. | | Use SSL | Indicates if the SMTP connection to the server should be secured by SSL. The server must be configured to use SSL in order for this to work. | > **Info:** **Configuring sender ('from') email addresses** > > The system can be setup to use a variety of sender email addresses depending on the type of email notification. For a list of all configurable sender email addresses the system uses, see [Configuring sender email addresses](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/configuring-kentico/configuring-smtp-servers/configuring-sender-email-addresses.md).