If you send your survey invitations via the easyfeedback email invitation tool, it is possible that the invitations are marked as spam or not delivered to the recipient.
This is a general problem, but can be fixed.
A. Technical background
B. The solution: SPF-Record
C. Test delivery
A. Technical background
In case of a regular sending of emails via a service provider (GMX, Yahoo, etc.) or via the own mail server (company server), the sender’s server and domain are identical:
Email: john.doe@company.com
Mail server: mail.company.com
In this case, email and server belong together and are delivered smoothly. If you send your invitations via easyfeedback’s email invitation tool, the emails are sent via easyfeedback’s mail server with your own e-mail domain. In this case, the email and server do not belong together and are classified as spam by mail servers.
For external surveys such as customer surveys, this is usually not a problem, which is why approximately 98% of the emails are delivered. However, with internal surveys such as employee surveys, it often happens that the mails are marked as spam or are not delivered at all.
Send ‘via’ …
You can verify, that the email was intentionally sent through easyfeedback. For this practice we attach a ‘Send on behalf of indivsurvey.de’ to the mail. Usually this should already be enough, to get the mail delivered.
Example display of the email header:
From: John Doe <j.doe@your-domain.de> on behalf of <noreply@indivsurvey.com>
Subject: Invitation to the survey
Date: 16. December 2014
To: employee@company.com
Reply-To: j.doe@company.com
B. The solution: SPF record as authentication
If your emails are not being delivered, you can fix the problem by setting an SPF record with yourself in the mail server.
The SPF record authenticates the sending from your email domain as the sender via the easyfeedback mail server. You only need to set the SPF record once and can then use it for all future email invitations via easyfeedback – both for internal and external survey projects.
Authentication via SPF record
Copy and forward the following SPF record to your IT department with the request to store it in the DNS record of the name server:
SPF record: v=spf1 mx:indivsurvey.de -all
If mails are still not delivered, it may be that deeper settings or a firewall are blocking the emails. In this case, please talk to your IT department. Make sure that the e-mail address is enabled for sending e-mails via external tools.
C. Test delivery of the emails
Before you send the final invitations via our invitation tool, you can test the delivery in advance. Firstly, via the test mail function, which can be found in the email invitation tool, or by adding yourself to the participant list as a recipient on a test basis.
With these two methods you can test the delivery in advance. If the email invitation is not delivered or is marked as spam, then this is due to the technical reasons mentioned previously.
In this case, change the sender’s email to a private email address, for example (GMX, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). As soon as the domain of the recipient and sender is not identical, the probability of delivery is very high. If the email invitations are delivered now, you know that the settings of your mail server prevent the reception.