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 Whitelabelling?
Whitelabelling is a service that Vanilla offers to Corporate and Enterprise level clients only. See our plan levels here
Vanilla sends email notifications on behalf of your Vanilla community via Sendgrid.
Whitelabelling 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 whitelabel, 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 Whitelabelling?
- 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 your CSM and confirm your outgoing email is in place.
- Your CSM 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 your CSM in step 3.
- Confirm to your CSM that the DNS records are in place.
- Your CSM will coordinate with Ops to ensure white labelling is in place and confirm back to you
