If you've experienced email delivery issues such as:
*Rejected/blocked emails
*Bounced outbound emails
*Clients reporting that the emails sent from your ISN are going to their spam folder
it's possible that your ISN is missing a configuration.
In this article we will explain how the email module works in order to choose the proper configuration (SPF or SMTP) to prevent future email delivery incidents.
How Does The Email System Work in ISN?
First, it's important to understand how the email system works in ISN in order to better understand email delivery issues.
As you've noticed ISN doesn't provide an actual email address. The system will use the email address that you manually enter in your user profile when you create your account or in the senders email address field when you create an email event.
Once a manual email is sent from ISN the system will use the email address found in the profile of the user logged in that session as the sender. On the other hand, the email events will use the email address that you manually configure in the field "Sender's Email Address"
Recipient's email servers will detect that the emails apparently coming from your email provider are actually coming from our ISN server. The recipient's email system might categorize those emails as possible spam/thread and the emails could be block, rejected or in the best scenario the email will go to spam.
What Configuration do I need?
There are two types of configurations to prevent email delivery issues. Those are SPF and SMTP. The configuration that you need will depend on the type of email address that you have.
In general both SPF and SMTP are settings used as standard email authentication methods to specify the servers and domains that are authorized to send email on behalf of your organization.
In simple terms these two configurations will prove that ISN has permission to send emails on behalf of your email domain provider so the emails sent from ISN are not blocked, rejected or bounced.
For private domain email addresses you will require to use a SPF configuration while for public domain email addresses you will need to use a SMTP configuration.
Private Domains and SPF
A professional email address is the one that you normally purchase that is based on your custom domain. In other words, it is one that has your business name in it
E.g. username@inspectioncompany.com
These type of emails need to have an special SPF configuration that must be completed outside ISN directly in your domain provider admin panel or settings page. For more information regarding this configuration please review the following articles:
Public Domains & SMTP
On the other hand a public domain email is an email provided by a free service provider such as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook etc.
E.g. john@gmail.com
These type of emails will require a SMTP configurations that can be completed directly inside your ISN system. For more information regarding this configuration please review the following articles:
If you have any question feel free to contact our support team at 1-800-700-8112 or via email at help@inspectionsupport.com