Improving Email Reliability
There are many factors that that influence whether an email you send is delivered. If you want Gomembers to send its emails (like Connect purchase confirmation emails, account notifications, etc.) as if your email servers had actually sent the email, this article provides important information.
Is This Email Legit?
When any email message is received, the recipient's email server may perform a check of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to verify that the email came from who it says it came from. This is a security measure to prevent phishing and spamming. If there isn't a valid "SPF record" that verifies the identity of the sender, the email may be flagged as untrustworthy or may not even deliver the message to your recipient at all. By default, Gomembers avoids delivery problems by sending email from our own domain (using orders@gomembers.com)
Customizing Emails Send By Gomembers Connect
Gomembers has a feature that allows you to configure emails we send on your behalf to appear as if they were sent from your email server. It allows you to configure the email to arrive as if it was sent by your domain by modifying the "From(email)" and "Reply To" (see illustration). Your recipients will more likely welcome email from your domain, so it is friendly to configure your Gomembers messages this way. We recommend you set up an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to verify that Gomembers can send outgoing email on behalf of your email server. This is optional, but highly recommended if you want to increase the chances all recipients will receive our messages.
The Preferences box above can be found on
Connect's Instance Preferences / Email Preferences page. Individual Forms' email preferences can also be changed on a Form's
Confirmation Email page. Please contact your IT or email service provider for help to set or manage your SPF settings. The SPF text we recommend adding to your SPF record is
v=spf1 mx:connect.aptean.com ~all
What's an SPF?
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses. SPF allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send mail from a given domain by creating a specific SPF record (or TXT record) in the Domain Name System (DNS). Mail exchangers use the DNS to check that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host sanctioned by that domain's administrators. An SPF record is a single line of text that declares which SMTP servers, other than your own, are allowed to send email as if it originated from your domain.
You can read more about the Sender Policy Framework here
What Should I Do Now?
a) If you haven't changed our default email settings (so Connect sends all emails with our Gomembers domain) you don't need to do anything.
b) If you have changed the From and Reply To fields above at any time, contact your IT or email service provider for help in adding an SPF record to your DNS entries.