Further to my email from yesterday...

You're going to receive daily report emails, because of this new DMARC setup.

DMARC works like this:  Each of the big email providers (Gmail, etc) sends a report every day to the email address designated in the DMARC record.  You'll probably get 2 or 3 of these per day.  They're not hugely important, and can usually be discarded.

Each report summarises how many emails were received by that provider in the past 24 hours from emails connected to your domain name, and describes what happened to each (delivered, spam folder, rejected, etc).  Hooray, you say!  Now we'll really know what's going on!  But the problem is that the reports are in XML format, inside a ZIP file, which is not at all easy for a human to read.  If you wanted to properly understand these reports, you need to find some software that will convert them into a format that a human can understand.  There are several websites that will do this for you, for free.  If you care.  I've been getting these reports now for a few months, and after analysing the first couple, I now simply discard them.  You can safely discard all of them, forever.

These emails will go to your "webmaster" email address.  For example, if you have a domain name of mygroup.com, they'll go to webmaster@mygroup.com.  Every HarmonySite NEEDS to have a webmaster email address.  It's important!  It's one of the items in your HarmonySite "checklist" (the link to which is at the top of your Admin Dashboard.  If you have not yet set up a "Webmaster" position, with a webmaster@ email address, then I recommend you do so ASAP - not just to receive these DMARC report emails, but for several other more important reasons, such as mailing list moderation.

Please don't forward me these DMARC reports asking me to make sense of them for you.  I'm not yet ready to consider that part of the support service I offer to our hundreds of clients.  I simply don't have the time.  Maybe in the future if things change...

In harmony,

Mark.

P.S.  Please wait at least 24 hours for this change to take effect.  Testing it immediately may not show any difference...

An update to my email below...

My understanding of what changed recently with the big email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) is that they've started enforcing the email protocol called DMARC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC).  Any domain name that doesn't have a DMARC record gets "penalised" - their emails go to spam, regardless of the sender, the sending server, or the content of the email!  Yes, that's heavy-handed, but that's their strategy for combatting spam worldwide - force all the legitimate senders of the world to start using DMARC.

Anyway, I've spent a few hours today adding a DMARC record to EVERY client we have (that's you!).  So hopefully that will improve the emails-going-to-spam situation.

Many of you have reported to me, in the last 24 hours, that even emails from your own special email addresses (e.g. president@mygroup.com) are going to spam.  This DMARC change should fix that problem.  As for emails from members that don't have special email addresses - delivery of these MAY be improved by this latest change.

I'm still investigating more options...

In harmony,

Mark.

Dear HarmonySite Administrator,

There have been many (MANY) reports lately of emails sent through your HarmonySite ending up in the recipients' junk folders.  So I thought it a good idea to appraise everyone of the situation...

It would appear that the big email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) have been tightening up their spam filters lately.  This is a problem for systems like ours, as I'll explain below.  In fact, it's ALWAYS been a problem, and we here at HarmonySite have been adjusting our email-sending practices constantly over the years to fit into the ever-changing rules.

Here's what's going on (this was recently posted by me in the Facebook HarmonySite Users Group)...

The main reason this happens is:  An email gets sent via the website, or via the mailing lists. The sender is one of your members, from their own personal email address being something like fred@yahoo.com.  The mail servers of all the recipients look at the sender's address, and notice that it's "yahoo.com".  Then they notice that it's coming from the HarmonySite server, not the Yahoo server.  That is deemed suspicious by the mail providers, so the emails end up in spam folders.  Sometimes the email is rejected outright (if, for example, the recipient mail server is also Yahoo - they KNOW the email didn't come from them).

The only way to avoid this is to send every email from an email address that ends in your group's domain name.  For example, if your group's website is www.mygroup.com, then the email would need to be sent from something@mygroup.com.  You CAN do that on the "Send Email" page of your HarmonySite, but only if the sender holds a position, and the position has a mygroup.com email address.  If you're sending from your own email program, you only have that option if your mygroup.com email address is a "POP mailbox", not a forwarder.

For the technically minded of you:  We're actually following all the protocols.  The emails sent out always have a "from" email address is a "mygroup.com" address, usually noreply@mygroup.com (or if it's a mailing list, members-bounces@mygroup.com).  The REPLY-TO address of the email is set to fred@yahoo.com.  That is SUPPOSED to be the right way to do things.  But lately the big mail providers have been moving the goalposts, and ignoring the "from" part of the email and focussing on the "reply-to" part.  Very frustrating!

The big email providers don't really care that huge numbers of legitimate emails are going to spam.  All they care about is keeping ACTUAL spam out of their users' Inboxes.  They're overzealous about that issue.  Systems like ours (HarmonySite) suffer for that.

So there's no easy solution here.  You REALLY need to educate your members to check their spam folders regularly - and not just in their own email program, but also in their mail provider's webmail system (e.g. www.gmail.com, or https://mail.yahoo.com, etc.).

I will continue to investigate solutions to this problem, such as DMARC.  Suggestions are welcome...

In harmony,

In harmony,

Mark Virtue

HarmonySite

Australia

+61 2 8005 4277 (Australian number)

In North America, call:  1-415-651-7009 (San Francisco number)

Skype name:  mvirtue

mark@harmonysite.com

www.harmonysite.com