I thought I would make a few comments on this, as I am asked this question in various ways each month.
The particular problem I was asked to look at related to an organisation using an external bulk mail provider; Survey Monkey.
In this case the client wished to use an external service called Survey Monkey (although it could be any bulk mail provider) to send emails out on behalf of the organisation. An example would be Fred; fred@mycoolsite.org.uk decides to send a survey to Fred’s clients. The email which is sent out by Survey Monkey, says it is from fred@mycoolsite.org.uk so you are more likely to accept it and open it because you know Fred.
However it goes into your junk mail so you never see it unless you choose to look in your junkmail, why?
Server Policy Framework
Most sites use something called a SPF record in the settings. I normally set this up for you. It is a basic anti spam mechanism. When the receiving server gets the message, it does a simple check which is in human terms: Who is the legitimate sender of this message? To do this the receiver checks the remote SPF record for the domain mycoolsite.org.uk which lists the names of the servers that can send mail on behalf of mycoolsite.org.uk. Within the header of the message there is some information about where address of the sending server. If there is no match, the message is marked as junk, and may end up in your junk mail folder. All of this is transparent to us humans, it is an automatic process. Most spam messages never come from where they appear to come from. That is what this process if detecting.
In the case I started to discuss in this article, the client had set up Survey Monkey as a sending source for messages from their domain. However when these messages were received, they were checked and of course Survey Monkey was not a legitimate sender because it had not been set up.
The SPF record is held in your hosting control panel. If you have access to your hosting control panel, then you can make the changes yourself. If you are doing this, just let me know in case later problems crop up.
How to resolve this
There are circumstances where you may wish to use an external mail provider, or bulk mail provider which is outside of our relationship. There is nothing stopping you from moving entirely outside of the mail service offered by my hosting or using it in parallel with something else. In some cases some organisations have moved out of the email provision to use Outlook 365 because it offers some additional things like shared calendars.
Where someone else is sending mail on your behalf (technically it looks like you are sending the message) then it is important to update the SPF record in the hosting to show this. Then when the receiver checks the address of sender there will be a match and the message will be accepted.
I don’t expect you to know all of the in’s and out’s of this, I will generally handle it for you. But please do be aware of any changes in your email systems (outsourcing to a third party), it is not quite that simple, if I am using your domain name.
As an example this is the standard SPF record for any website I am hosting:
“v=spf1 include:spf.stackmail.com a mx -all”
And this is the SPF record with Survey Monkey added in as a legitimate sender of mail on behalf of your organisation, while retaining your main mail server:
“v=spf1 include:surveymonkey.com include:research.net include:go.surveymonkey.com include:t.outbound.surveymonkey.com include:m.outbound.surveymonkey.com include:lr.surveymonkeyuser.com include:hr.surveymonkeyuser.com include:outbound.research.net include:spf.stackmail.com a mx ~all”
As you can see the record is a lot more complex listing 8 additional servers. Once this record was set up mail did not go into junk mail anymore.
But….
And there is always a but, this is one case only, there are lots of other reasons why messages go into junk mail, but start with this one if you are using an external mail sending service.