Our platform uses SendGrid as our bulk emailing service, which means that all emails sent from our platform will run through SendGrid and be delivered by SendGrid servers.


Customising the "From" (Sender) Address for platform emails


The platform will normally send emails from our "noreply" default sender address.  


If you want to customise this "from" address, you can do so at a company account level via the "Default Sender" options found on Organisation Setup page of the secure portal.


Customers using our branded (white label) offerings can further customise the default sender address as applied to all company accounts under that brand.

This is configured via the "Customise Messages" page which is accessed via the Manage Platform area of the secure website.

Note that the "Customise Messages" option is purely a brand-level default; changes in the Organisation Setup page of accounts under that brand will override the Customise Messages settings.


Troubleshooting Email Delivery Issues


You may find that emails sent by our platform (via SendGrid) are being filtered or "held" by your email server/provider, resulting in the emails not reaching their intended recipients.

A simple way that IT administrators can address this issue is to add SendGrid's server IPs to their "approved" email originator lists.

Unfortunately this is not possible because our platform uses a SendGrid option that involves dynamic IPs, which means the SendGrid IP addresses change regularly.

SendGrid also does not currently publish a list of these dynamic IPs, which means that it is not possible for IT administrators to add IP rules for allowing incoming mail.


Luckily there is a better method than using IP filters - Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

SPF is an email authentication standard developed by AOL that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record.


If you are using a custom sender email address on your email connectors (or elsewhere on the platform), then you should consider adding an SPF rule to your chosen sender email domain.

SPF rules allow recipient email servers to verify platform emails have been authorised to be sent from your sender domain, which in turn prevents your emails from being blocked/bounced as suspected spam email.



Adding an SPF entry onto your sender web domain


To add an SPF record, you need to log into the administration area of your sender web domain or DNS provider's website.

You may need to search the knowledge base of your web domain registrar for the details of how to add an SPF record.

For example, Namecheap's article is here, while GoDaddy has help here.  

A quick Google search for "add spf record <your registrar name>" should find you the help document for your specific registrar.


Once you have found the area in the admin site that lets you add DNS records to your custom domain, you need to include a SendGrid reference.


If you do not have an SPF record for your domain you must create a TXT record with the value:

v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all

 

Already have an SPF record for your domain?

No problem. You simply need to add the SendGrid include onto your existing record.


For example, if your record looks like this:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all

 

You just need to add include:sendgrid.net at the end of the string, before the ~all mechanism, like so:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:sendgrid.net ~all


Make sure that you save/apply your SPF record changes.


Once this is done, the number of email bounces/blocks that you experience when sending emails from our platform should be negligible.



Recipient Mail Server Filtering


In some cases having an SPF record on your sender email domain is not enough.

Some email filters are very aggressive and some organisations have very strict receive email rules.


In these cases you will need to talk to the administrators of the recipient server in question and request that the administrators whitelist SendGrid originating emails sent from your custom sender email address based on the email metadata.  
This means that the filters will have an exception in place to allow your platform emails through.



If none of the above helps, then please feel free to contact our support team for further assistance.

Our support personnel can check our SendGrid administration area to provide more details of blocks/bounces on request.