Depending on how your email system is set-up and its interaction with the Adventure Office email servers, your customers may not receive emails or the emails may end up in their spam folder. This can impact reservation confirmations, automated emails, individual emails and email marketing campaigns.
We received the following notice from Constant Contact, which does a great job of explaining the issue. Since the time Constant Contact sent the notice, Google implemented the change without notice.
“Google is set to Make A Change to their authentication policy that impacts people who use Gmail to send emails through a third-party service like Constant Contact. Free email providers like Yahoo, AOL, and soon Google have adopted the strict DMARC email authentication protocol to prevent spam. So if your business uses ‘@gmail.com’ as the ‘from’ address through Constant Contact, Google’s protocol will tell receiving servers to reject the email because it’s not sent through a Google server–and the email will most likely bounce or go to spam.”
The Adventure Office email system is designed to interact with your email server. The non-technical process:
- A client has an email service provider through which they utilize their own url, such as @companyname.com. In most cases, the URL is the same as their web site URL.
- The Adventure Office email system is designed to transfer outgoing emails to the client’s email server using something called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Having been pre-configured by the client’s email service provider to accept SMTP transfers for outgoing email, the clients email server accepts the email from Adventure Office servers.
- The client’s email service provider sends out the emails, subject to any daily limitations. This ensures the from/reply address on the emails is the same as the email server sending emails to the client’s customers.
- This type of set-up is the best practice to ensure smooth email operations and should not be impacted by the changes occurring in the email industry.
- We strongly encourage utilizing a paid email service, which is normally an optional service offered by the company providing URL registry, such a GoDaddy or Network Solutions.
- If a client uses a free email service such as @gmail or @yahoo, their emails have to be sent out via that particular service, and most of these services severely limit the number of emails that can be sent in a given day.
These industry changes impact any client still sending emails to customers directly from the Adventure Office email system. The outgoing email has the client’s from address/reply such as @companyname.com, but it is being sent from the Adventure Office mail server which has the URL adventurecentral.com.
Customers of the client only see the @companyname.com, but the large email providers know the from/reply address URL is different than the email server URL that sends the email. After the industry changes, these emails are much more likely to be treated as spam and not be delivered to the client’s customers.