Our customers can be divided into two groups:
- One group uses iPROT ‘only’ for documenting meeting minutes. The finished PDFs are then integrated into project platforms or forwarded to the recipients according to company-specific procedures.
- The second group also uses iPROT’s sending function to forward download links of the meeting minutes to all relevant persons. And in this case, it is, of course, crucial that the recipients actually receive these emails!
This article briefly summarizes our efforts to ensure iPROT emails are sent as perfectly as possible.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
Our mail server is configured according to all best practices:
- We use the Sender Policy Framework (SPF, Wikipedia) to prevent foreign mail servers from sending emails ostensibly from iprot.eu.
- When sending, we sign all emails with Domain Keys (DKIM, Wikipedia) so that the target mail server can verify that the email was actually sent from the iprot.eu mail server.
- Our mail server complies with the rules of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC, Wikipedia).
- We regularly check that our mail server does not end up on any blackmail list.
- We verify our mail server’s configuration on sites like www.mail-tester.com or mxtoolbox.com.
Spam Detection
Despite our efforts, it sometimes happens that the recipient’s mail system believes an iPROT email is spam. If the company’s mail server rejects the email, we contact the company’s administrator and try to resolve the issue. Fortunately, since we switched to a new server and the iprot.eu domain in March 2019, this has not been necessary even once.
However, it can also happen that the email is delivered but is mistakenly identified as spam in the recipient’s inbox. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about this. As a rule, it helps if the recipient adds the address iprot-at-iprot-dot-eu to their list of known addresses (address book, whitelist, etc.) or explicitly indicates in their email program that it is not spam.
Incorrect Email Addresses
By far the most common problem with distribution email is that incorrect email addresses are stored in the user administration – mostly due to a typo during entry. Naturally, the email cannot reach the recipient in such cases. Instead, we (the iPROT support team) receive an error message.
We then inform the author of the meeting minutes about the problem and ask them to correct the email address. These error notifications cannot be generated automatically but require manual work from us each time. Therefore, we notify about an incorrect email address a maximum of three times.
