Email deliverability and whitelisting

Direct alerts and reminders from the Appraisd system

Appraisd sends users various emails including password resets or reminders for actions they should take. 

We have added a valid SPF record to our DNS records which should allow through mail from GSuite (eg from our Customer Success team) as well as from the Appraisd application itself. While we do all we can to ensure delivery, every email system is different and the standards vary. You therefore may need to also take these steps to ensure your employees receive their emails promptly.

We currently use a third party specialist email provider called Sparkpost (www.sparkpost.com) to send mail which means the actual msg_from could be something like xxxxxxxxx@spmailtechnolo.com.

All emails sent to users come from the friendly address of app@appraisd.com - please whitelist this email address too. 

We send emails from the following IP addresses:

Please ensure you whitelist these IP addresses and hostnames as appropriate for your email systems.

Mailchimp

We use Mailchimp to send correspondence to our admins about security updates and new features. Your IT team may also need to whitelist Mailchimp's IP addresses in order to receive these. The details can be found here. Please make sure your organisation is able to receive these emails otherwise you may miss out on crucial information from us.

Bounces

Hard bounces

A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered. Here are some common reasons an email may hard bounce:

• Recipient email address doesn't exist.
• Recipient email server has completely blocked delivery.
• Denied by firewall or filter - a spam filter may have interpreted the email content as spam; spam filters can be on the recipient's computer, on their company's email firewall.

We use Sparkpost because it can tell Appraisd when an email we have sent has hard bounced. This usually happens because the user's email address has been entered into Appraisd incorrectly or because an email address has been added to Appraisd before it's been activated by your IT team. Without this feature, we'd see many more people unable to log in or receive alerts due to incorrect email addresses. If you think a user may have been added to our Sparkpost suppressions list but does have the correct email address in Appraisd, please email us at support@appraisd.com or let us know via the live chat and we can remove them for you.

Soft bounces

Soft bounces typically indicate a temporary delivery issue and are handled differently than hard bounces. They are not added to our suppressions list but will still be flagged with a red envelope warning icon in Appraisd.

While there are many reasons an email address may soft bounce, these are some common reasons this could happen:

• Mailbox is full (over quota).
• Mailbox is not configured correctly.
• Mailbox is inactive.
• Recipient email server is down or offline.
• Recipient email server has been sent too many emails during a period of time.
• Email message is too large.
• Domain name does not exist.
• Email message blocked due to content.
• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s policies.
• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s DMARC requirements for authentication.
• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s anti-spam requirements.
• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s anti-virus requirements.
• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s sender requirements.
• Email cannot be relayed between email servers.
• Email cannot be relayed for unknown reasons.

We recommend that you whitelist the email addresses and IP addresses listed above to avoid soft bounces.