Email - Avoiding Email from Your Site Being Treated as Spam or Rejected

LegalServer allows users to send email messages from your site. For example when adding a case note.

These emails are sent by our server, but have a "From:" that is the user's email address (our clients want the recipients to see who created the message). These emails often run afoul of anti-spoofing and other spam/junk email rules because the message from janesmith@abclegal.org did not come from abclegal.org's server, but our mail server (mail.legalserver.org).

In this Article:

• Optional No Spoofing (For Most Emails Sent from LegalServer)
• Exempt our Mail Server (Email Sent to Staff)
• Email Sent to Others (and Staff)
  • Specific Features that Send Emails
  • SPF
  • DKIM
• Microsoft Mail Servers

Optional No Spoofing (For Most Emails Sent from LegalServer

There is a setting we can enable on a site that disables spoofing. Most emails sent from LegalServer will come from "noreply@<your site abbreviation>.legalserver.org".

An emailed case note will include the case's email address and the sender's email in the "reply-to" header. In this example, user Foobar Bazmin emailed a case note to user rwilhoite from the ronw-demo site:

Any well-behaved email program will reply to Foobar and the case:

Exempt our Mail Server (Email to Staff)

This will only affect email sent to your staff. To prevent it from being tagged as spam, your incoming mail server can provide an exception for our server. Your staff or vendor who administers your email service can do this. Let them know that you want to exempt mail coming from this source:

mail.legalserver.org
IPv4 address: 18.221.246.237
IPv6 address: 2600:1f16:c7d:ab00:ec2:ea57:2c:9a7e       

Email Sent to Others (and Staff)

These options are primarily for avoiding email sent to your clients, pro bono users, or others from being tagged as spam or blocked, but can help with email sent to staff if you can't exempt our mail server as in the previous section.

Specific Features that Send Emails

Look at the feature sending the email and see if setting the "From" address to "noreply@legalserver.org" or "noreply@<your site abbreviation>.legalserver.org" is an option.

Probably the biggest potential source of pain for most sites will be sending emails to clients via the Send Email block, the Email PDF of Profile block, and when emailing links to external forms.

All of those allow you to configure the "From:" for the email to be "noreply@legalserver.org" or "noreply@<your site abbreviation>.legalserver.org" if you prefer. Gmail, etc., should treat such emails as not being "spoofed", and thus not run afoul of their restrictions.

SPF

Your organization's SPF record can include the following:

include:_spf.legalserver.org

Any existing SPF entries related to LegalServer email should be removed.

DKIM

LegalServer staff can help you implement DKIM by providing a DKIM key you can add to your organization's DNS records.

We create the keys with the default selector "legalserver". If you want a different selector, put that it in the support request.

If you want a DKIM key, file a support request from your site (Help menu > Support Request).

Microsoft Mail Servers

One of our clients struggled to stop getting email from LS tagged as spam/junk. This is the final chapter in their story. Your mileage may vary, don't run with scissors, etc.:

Weird indeed. But maybe helpful to others.