In any community, email is an essential tool to communicate with your members. Sometimes it may get overlooked as a feature but there are some important aspects regarding email and email settings that are important to take note of.
See main topic on changing the look and feel of your email notifications
Outgoing Email Setting
Before you launch your community, you will want to review your outgoing email settings. By default, the outgoing email is the same email used for your Vanilla Forums account. It will also become the email address that all new users will see when they receive emails from your community, including any notifications they have subscribed to.
If the email used is not something you want public, you should change it before you launch your community. To modify the email address displayed, you can make an update in your Vanilla Forums dashboard. You will find the settings page under the menu item "Outgoing Email". Once on that page, you will be presented with the following screen.
Update it to an email address that you are comfortable letting users receive emails from. Also, make sure to give it a meaningful name so users know it's from your community.
How do we ensure good deliverability?
Email is sent via a 3rd party transactional email service that employs a full time postmaster and ensures that their sending IP addresses are always in good standing with ISPs. If notifications are not getting through your corporate email server, add include:sendgrid.net OR ip4:208.117.49.186 to the domain SPF record.
What Is Sender Authentication?
Sender authentication is a service that Vanilla offers to Corporate 2020, Enterprise 2020, Essential 2021, Corporate 2021, Enterprise 2021 and Enterprise Plus 2021 level clients only. See our plan levels here
Vanilla sends email notifications on behalf of your Vanilla community via Sendgrid.
Sender authentication refers to the process of showing ISPs that Vanilla and our provider SendGrid has your permission to send Community emails on your behalf.
To set up a sender authentication, we will need to add DNS records to your hosting service. These DNS records associate your sending domain with SendGrid— when an inbox provider processes your email, they will see your domain instead of 'via vanillaforums.com':
How to set up Sender Authentication?
- Decide what your outgoing email address will be (where the notifications come from) and ensure it is set up in your forum settings under ‘outgoing email’
- Contact the Support Desk and confirm your outgoing email is in place.
- A Support Agent will then coordinate with Vanilla Ops to provide you with the correct DNS records to update
- Have your technical team implement the DNS records provided to you by the Support Agent in step 3.
- Confirm with the Support Agent that the DNS records are in place.
- The Support Agent will coordinate with Ops to ensure sender authentication is in place and confirm back to you
Default Delivery
Delivery with Sender Authentication
