I do not receive email sendouts
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I do not receive email sendouts, why not? The most popular method of survey distribution is via email sendout. In this guide, we will look at why you do not receive e-mail sendouts and what you can do to lower the chances of this happening.
Why I do not receive email sendouts?
E-mail security protections are some of the most common reasons behind undelivered sendouts. Most e-mail providers have security protocols in place to prevent spam, phishing and forgery attacks. While this all works to keep you safe, it can cause e-mails from the Netigate system to be blocked or incorrectly categorised as spam.
At Netigate, we have ongoing controls and checks to ensure that our mail servers are not flagged as spam or blacklisted. Despite this, some e-mails from our platform may still fall through the net.
What can I do to prevent this from happening?
Due to the complexity and individual levels of security across organisations, there are a couple of checks we recommend you do before beginning to distribute surveys via email.
1. SPF record.
The best way, and our primary recommendation, is that your company adds an SPF record (Sender Policy Framework).
In this SPF record you should add the Netigate domain (depending on which server your account is on):
Azure server: _spf.netigate.se
DACH server: _spf.ntgt.de
A good way to identify which server you are located on is to look at the platform’s URL in your browser. If it says netigate.se you are on the Azure server, and if it is ntgt.de you are on DACH.
By adding the SPF record, Netigate can add and remove permitted mail servers without you having to change your DNS record whenever we update our mail server settings. You will probably need help from your IT department or e-mail administrators to set this up.
2. Whitelist IP
You can choose to add an SPF record but instead of including the Netigate domain you can do it on our mail server IP address. It is less flexible and more sensitive to change. If we make updates or add/remove servers, we cannot guarantee that the existing SPF record will continue to work. We therefore recommend including the Netigate domain instead of the server IP.
IP addresses for our mail servers:
89.45.227.221
46.254.11.92
89.45.227.195
86.107.243.139
3. Use a neutral email address as sender.
This is a solution in some cases. Instead of using a company-specific email address (for example firstname.lastname@company.net) you can use an address provided by Netigate e.g. survey@netigate.se. This will increase the chance of the e-mail being allowed through incoming e-mail filters, as we do not masquerade as any other website (spoofing).
You are welcome to use survey@netigate.se or survey@ntgt.de for your sendout.
Note: these are no-reply inboxes, so you will not have access to any responses that are returned to these addresses.
DKIM
If you use DKIM within your organisation, you may also combine your SPF record with DKIM keys.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a protocol that allows an organisation to take responsibility for transmitting a message in a way that can be verified by mailbox providers. This verification is made possible through cryptographic authentication.
To read more about adding DKIM keys to your Netigate account, click here.
TLS
We are using Transport Layer Security (TLS) for encrypting and securing e-mail transmissions between our mail servers and the recipients’ mail servers.
To ensure that you will receive our e-mail sendouts, TLS needs to be enabled on your incoming mail server. You probably need help from your IT department or e-mail administrators to enable this.
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