Configuring Your Email For Optimal Delivery

With spam detection becoming more sophisticated, it has become essential to configure your email for authentication. Doing this will improve email deliverability and will help you get your message in front of your customers. Teachworks provides 3 methods to configure your email for authentication. 

1. Verifying Email Addresses for Sending

Teachworks works with the email delivery service Postmark for sending transactional emails (account confirmations, invoices, payment receipts, reminders, etc.). Postmark specializes in fast delivery and avoiding the spam folder. You can complete the verification step below so that your transactional emails are sent through Postmark to ensure effective delivery of these emails.

Only private email addresses can be verified, so if you’re using a free email service, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. you will not be able to verify your email address for sending emails. We strongly recommend that you set up an email address on your own website domain so that you can verify your email address and improve deliverability.

How To Verify Your Email Address

1. Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on Account Settings.
2. Scroll down to the "Company Information" section and refer to the "Email" field.  You'll see a blue text box indicating that the email address has not been verified.
   
3. Click the "View Details" link and then select the "Verify an Email Address" option in the pop-up.
4. Add the relevant email address in the "Email Address" field and click on "Verify".
5. An email will be sent to the email address and you will be prompted to confirm the Sender Signature.

Viewing Verified Email Addresses

To quickly check all verified email addresses for your Teachworks account, follow the steps below:

1. Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on "Account Settings".
2. Scroll down to the "Company Information" section and click on the “View Details” link under the Email field.
3. Select the “View Verified Email Addresses” option.
4. On this page, you can easily manage email addresses.

After you’ve verified an email address, you can check that it has been verified by clicking the “Check Status” button at the top of the Verified Email Addresses page. If the email has been verified successfully, the status column will be updated from "Pending" to "Verified".

 

For emails that are still pending, you can resend the confirmation email by clicking the “Resend Confirmation” button that appears in the row of the email address.

NOTE: If you're using a Master Account and using the same email address in multiple branches, you will need to submit the email address for verification for each branch separately. Email addresses can only be verified once, so as soon as you've submitted the email address it will be marked as verified immediately.

2. Add DKIM to Your DNS Records

Once you have verified your email address, you can further enhance the deliverability of your emails by adding a DKIM record to your DNS settings. The following article has instructions on how to complete complete this: Add DKIM to DNS Records.

3. Adding SPF Records

NOTE: This setting applies only if you're using the Email Add-On. 

To send notifications to your customers through Teachworks using your own company's email address, it's important that you add an SPF text record to your domain to maximize deliverability. This option is useful for companies with unverified email addresses. We also recommend it for companies sending non-transactional emails (such as emails sent through the Email Add-On).

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It's a method to prevent sender address spoofing by verifying sender IP addresses. Basically, when a sender adds an SPF text record to their domain (say, example.com), they are authorizing an email service provider, like Teachworks, to send emails from @example.com. Non-authorized IPs will not be permitted to send from @example.com.

Without this record in place, receiving ESPs like Gmail and Yahoo are more likely to flag the email as spam.

In order to improve deliverability of your emails sent from Teachworks, add the following SPF text record to your domain's DNS records:

“v=spf1 include:mailgun.org ~all”

Changes to DNS records can take up to 24-48 hours to propagate.