One of the most important features of EvBoo is its ability to email participants and leaders directly. Almost all features have a requirement to send an email to a registration, activity provider etc.
For most events, email is sent on behalf of the Event rather than from an internal EvBoo address. This is really important to ensure users feel directly connected with your Event. To do this, the EvBoo system will send email from your internet domain name e.g. bookings@mytown-scouts.org.uk where mytown-scouts.org.uk is the domain name.
As we all know however, spam email is a significant challenge and email systems try very hard to determine what email is SPAM and what email is legitimate. To support this, many systems use Sender Policy Framework (SPF) as a method of determining what email systems are allowed to send email for each domain. EvBoo uses multiple servers to send email and therefore in order to ensure email is delivered correctly, you will need to ensure you update the SPF record for your domain.
Each internet service provider will have its own domain management console which can be used to update this record. If you need help creating this record please get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction!
Creating your SPF record
In most cases, you should already have an SPF record. We therefore recommend you inspect that record and write down the current configuration. Do not remove the current settings as this might effect the sending of existing email. We recommend using MX Toolbox to check the current configuration. MX Toolbox can be found here – http://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx.
Having established how to update the record and noted the current settings you will need to add the following to the existing settings. If you do not currently have an SPF record, you can create a new one with the settings below. A tool for helping to create a valid SPF record can be found here – http://www.spfwizard.net/.
Add the following to your SPF record, before the ending parameter which is normally -all.
include:smartmail.evboo.co.uk
An example of an updated SPF record is below, note ip4:11.22.33.44 is considered to represent the existing email server and is not required by EvBoo.
v=spf1 ip4:11.22.33.44 include:smartmail.evboo.co.uk -all
Updating the SPF record should reduce the volume of emails from EvBoo being marked as SPAM. This is however never completely possible and providers such as hotmail / outlook.com often mark email of this type as SPAM. You should instruct your users to check their SPAM / Junk Email folders if their email is not received.