How to ensure that participants receive emails sent through Backstage

As part of setting up your event, you'll need to send out emails to your audience. These emails are especially important, as they contain links that are needed to ensure that your app users can download and activate the app, or access the web app.

SpotMe's technology relies on the best transactional email providers in order to maximize email deliverability to participants. However, it can occur that some of your participants do not receive emails sent from your event via Backstage.

The process of sending emails is explained in our Inviting app users to the workspace article. In this article we will describe some additional actions that can help ensure that your emails safely reach your recipients.

Best practices to avoid spam filters

Spam filters can sometime prevent emails from reaching your participants. Follow the below best practices to help avoid your emails from getting blocked by spam filters:

•  Avoid using "noreply@something.com" or as the "From:" address for your emails, or  "companyname@spotme.com". Instead use an email address that is realistic, such as  "name@company.com"
• Always keep the "Unsubscribe" button in your email templates - do not remove it.
• Try to write a meaningful subject line that matches the sender logic and content.
• Avoid long subject lines (less than 140 characters).
• Avoid using words or expressions that may trigger the spam detector, such as:

  Limited time offer / Act now / Guaranteed / Risk-free / Cash / Discount / Save / Sale / Cheap / Incredible / Urgent / Incredible offer / No obligation / No purchase necessary / Special promotion / Click here / Congratulations / Double your / Prize / Open now.

• Make sure you have whitelisted the SpotMe domain, and updated your DNS domain's SPF record.

Additionally, you can refer to Mailchimp's spam filtering guidelines in order to limit the risk of emails being blocked by spam filters.

Whitelisting email domains

Some organizations allow incoming emails to be received only from approved services.

If your organization is using a email scanning or filtering software, you may want to add SpotMe's mailing server to the approve list. The SpotMe platform sends authentication emails that contain time-sensitive links. To ensure safe delivery of these active links, we recommend removing any artificial delays to email delivery.

Our mailing server: mail.spotme.com (198.2.132.142)

DKIM verification header: see details

To ensure that emails from SpotMe will be received by your app users, you can contact your IT department and request them to change the configuration of the network or email firewalls to allow emails from SpotMe to be received.

Below are some steps that can help with this:

1. Contact an IT professional or IT department within your organization, or ask your workspace/app users to do so.
2. Ask the IT department to whitelist emails coming from spotme.com as well as the following IP address: 198.2.132.142.
3. Once the SpotMe domain and IP addresses have been approved, try sending an email again.

If you are using your organization's domain when sending emails from Backstage, please make sure you have updated your DNS domain's SPF record.

If the IT department is unable to make the changes:

• For app download emails, use internal mass-emailing tools to launch your app.
• For app activation emails, review the available activation workflows, or contact SpotMe support to assist you in setting one up that does not rely on a timely email delivery.

What happens when a recipient hits "unsubscribe" in an email

If a recipient hits the unsubscribe button in an email received from a workspace, then that user will not receive any more emails from that specific workspace. This is applicable whether it is the spotme.com email domain that is sending the emails from Backstage, or any other domain.

Beyond this

If after taking the above actions some of your participants are still not receiving your event's emails, it's quite likely that this is being caused by something beyond SpotMe's control.

An alternative to sending emails via your event in Backstage could be to send email to participants via a personal email address or from within the relevant organization.