Optimize Email Delivery
To ensure that all emails from our system do not get stuck in spam filters, there is some work you'll want your IT team to do to 'White-List' our emails. Here’s what they need to know:
VolunteerMatch uses the email Return-path headers and the Received-SPF fields to facilitate bounce-tracking and track other email delivery problems. The Return-path and Received-SPF fields contain auto-generated unique ID's for each message. They are formatted as follows : "bt-<uniqueid>@svc.volunteermatch.org" To help our customers verify emails that we send on behalf of your company, we use email headers in the following way:
"From" - Automated emails from our service will always use a "From" address ending with "@svc.volunteermatch.org".
"Reply-To" - Automated emails that are sent as a result of a your company user's actions-such as signing up an employee for an event-will contain that employee's email address in the "Reply-To" header.
Emails that are purely transactional (such as a confirmation email when a user signs themselves up for an event) will use a "@svc.volunteermatch.org" address in the "Reply-To" header.
Finally, we recommend that our customers use one or both of our Email Sender Verification schemes, which are used to validate all emails that our service sends.
Received-SPF - SPF, or "Sender Policy Framework", provides a verification scheme that allows mail servers to confirm that the server that send an email is authorized to send emails on behalf of a domain. All of the emails sent by our service should indicate that SPF verification 'passes'.
DKIM - DomainKeys is another verification scheme, providing a signature on each outbound email that can be used to verify its authenticity.
Ideally you can configure your whitelist system to look at the 'From' and 'Reply To' addresses mentioned above rather than return-path headers, so hopefully this additional information gives you what you need to process emails from our service safely and securely.
