When clients suddenly stop receiving your notification messages, you may wonder what has changed. The answer, typically, is that the email security systems (aka spam filters) used by your client’s e-mail provider have been updated to include additional rules. If the e-mail in your clinic settings is not configured properly for these new checks, they may block your messages.
To understand what’s happening, first consider that a big priority for e-mail providers today is to protect their users from malicious senders. Spammers often pretend to be from the bank, the post office, and other organizations to get their messages read.
To combat this, providers began using something called a "reverse lookup" to determine whether a message is legitimately associated with the email system it is claiming to be from.
You can imagine this process as a type of digital background check:
Your clients’ e-mail provider (let's say Yahoo for example) will go to the provider associated with the email address your message is being sent from (let’s say you put a Gmail.com address in your clinic settings) and asks if they have any record of the sending server (in this case your mindZplay system), which you are using to send confirmations and reminders. In this example the verification will fail. When this happens, the receiving provider (Yahoo) will either not deliver the message to the recipient (deleting your message) so your client never sees it or send it to their spam folder, where it may go unnoticed.
These checks are not new, but they have been growing in importance and popularity with a growing list of both public and corporate e-mail providers, causing failures for people seemingly out of the blue.
It should be noted that mail providers do not allow users to add additional mail servers to the “valid sender list” for their domains – and for obvious reasons. Imagine what spammers would do if they did!
Luckily, there is a very simple way to pass these checks without doing anything technical. If your domain is being managed by us, we provide you with a @yourdomainhere.com e-mail address that is preconfigured to work with your website and pass these background checks. If you prefer, we can even set it up so that any mail sent to it will forward automatically to your existing e-mail address so you can continue using your existing e-mail. There is no additional cost for this as it is included as part of our domain management service fee.
If you are using an external domain, and you do not wish to have us manage it for you, you can of course still configure email addresses using that domain to recognize your website as a valid sender of mail.
In summary,
Your first step, when encounter mail delivery problems, is to check what e-mail address you have configured in your clinic settings. If you are not using an @yourdomainhere.com e-mail, there are two ways to resolve your e-mail issue:
- Contact us at mindZplay to claim an @yourdomainhere.com e-mail address. Once the email address is setup, we will add it to your clinic settings for you. No need for you to lift a finger, we’ll do all the work.
NOTE: This domain-based e-mail can be setup be on your phone, e-mail app, or software such as outlook if you do not wish to use our webmail. We can also set it up as an alias that forwards messages to an account you already own if you do not wish to change what you are doing now.
- If you have an externally managed domain through someone other than mindZplay, please visit our tutorial on how to properly configure your third-party domain and email to work with your website for more information. Once the email address has been setup, you will need to go into your clinic settings and add your e-mail address there as well.
Obviously, none of these changes will affect the messages sent out previously but both solutions will solve your delivery issues going forward.
Keep in mind that even when your e-mail is configured correctly, the occasional “misfire” of your client’s spam filters can still occur for a variety of reasons. It’s a good idea to always ask a client who reports a missed notification to add your e-mail to their contact list, check their spam, and if the message is in there be sure to mark it as “not spam.”