The SoftwareKey System has many features to automate license management for your company, including sending various email notifications to your customers. Some of these emails are important transactional emails that your customers need in order to access your software. Because the content and branding are completely customizable, there are important considerations for choosing the "from" address of these emails.
Free Email Service Providers Can't Be Used
If you use a free email service provider such as gmail.com, aol.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com, etc., you should never configure SOLO Server Automation to send emails from that email domain (e.g. yourname@gmail.com), as this is not allowed by these services for security reasons.
- To improve email deliverability, you should always send email from your company's domain name - presumably whatever domain name is powering your website.
- Note that if you are using a paid gmail account to accept email for your company's domain name, you should always configure SOLO Server to use a "from" email address pointing to your company's domain name instead of gmail.com.
Only company email addresses like sales@yourcompany.com should be used!
Summary of the Problem
Email security and email domain sending reputation has been a top priority for both free email service providers and company IT departments alike. They have started leveraging new email security standards to make it difficult or even impossible to use these email addresses when sending messages through other systems:
Cause
If emails from your SOLO Server Automation account are not being received by your customers or going into their spam / promotions folder, the problem is most likely caused by your IT department using SPF or DMARC policies to prevent anyone from impersonating your company to send malicious or phishing emails (which can lure unsuspecting users into providing sensitive information to hackers).
Solution
Our company uses a commercial 3rd-party service for sending emails, and they have two authentication mechanisms available to allow them to reliably send emails on behalf of your company.
- Option 1 (preferred) is to have your IT department configure your company's Domain Name Service (DNS) records to allow all email addresses from your domain to be sent through the system. This is a simple, one-time operation for your IT department.
- Option 2 - if you work for a very large company and know that the IT department is not easily accessible, it is possible to authenticate a single email address for use in the system. In this case, we would trigger a confirmation email to that email address, and you would click on a link in that email to confirm the request.
There are several drawbacks to Option 2:
- Verifying a Single sender email allows for a quick setup but the main disadvantage is that the domain will not align with SPF and DKIM. In some cases, without this alignment, this can result in emails being bounced or quarantined or sent silently to spam folders.
- Any time you want to change the From address on one of your mailings, the email address authentication process would need to be repeated for the new From address.
- Your customers may see "via smtpcorp.com" (or another similar domain) in Gmail when using this method.
If Option 1 is possible for you, please have the appropriate person in your company's IT department contact us regarding DNS administration. Otherwise, let us know the email address(es) that you would like to authenticate individually.