How to Ensure Delivery of E-mails Sent Through the PMS

Introduction

The hoteliga PMS has a template system where the user can prepare and send from inside a reservation various preset and personalized e-mails.

Those e-mails are sent with the sender being the e-mail that is defined in the basic settings of the property (Settings⇒Basic data) and are sent through Amazon mail server.

If you have also the hoteliga booking engine, the reservation confirmation e-mails are also sent through the same Amazon server.

Recently Google and Yahoo announced new sending requirements that will go into effect in February 2024, which should be applied also to mails sent trough the Amazon server. While these changes will require you to take a few new steps, enacting these measures will help improve deliverability and fix the issues with mails not sent or sent to spam.

This can be done by adjusting your domain's DNS settings. For example, if your internet domain is hotel.com, then you or your technical contact need to access the control panel of your hosting provider and go to the DNS section of hotel.com and do some adjustments.

Note: If your sender e-mail is not based on your own domain (e.g. info@hotel.com) but is a Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail or similar account, then you won't be able to do these adjustments and most probably e-mails sent through hoteliga won't be delivered at all or will enter the spam folder of the recipient.

The technical term for allowing hoteliga's e-mail server to send emails on your behalf is called Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

Adding DMARC Records to Your Internet Domain

Log in to the control panel of your hosting provider. Note: The hoteliga support team is not authorized to assist you with logging in to your internet domain control panel. If you are not sure how to do this, please contact your technical IT contact.

After successful log in, go to the DNS settings of your internet domain (e.g. hotel.com).

If You Don't Have SPF Records At All

In that case, all you need to do is to add a new record of type TXT after all the other records you already have (e.g. of type A, CNAME etc.). That TXT record is actually a specially formatted line that actually says "allow this IP address to be the sender of e-mails on behalf of me". The content of the TXT record should be as follows:

v=spf1 ip4:40.113.112.27 ~all

This command consists of the following parts:

• v=spf1 Sets the SPF version that is used.
• ip4:40.113.112.27 Allow the IP address (of protocol version 4) 40.113.112.27 (hoteliga's e-mail server) to send e-mails on your behalf.
• ~all Indicates that servers that are not listed previously are not authorized to send e-mails.

If You Already Have SPF Records

If you have already some SPF settings, there must be already some TXT records with something like this:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:136.243.149.225 include:mailgun.org include:zoho.com -all

or this:

v=spf1 ip4:188.164.201.250 ip4:188.164.201.231 +a +mx ~all

or any TXT record starting with v=spf1 and after that one or more ip4: prefixes followed by IP addresses or multiple include: prefixes with domains (e.g. mailgun.org for transactional e-mails).

What you need to do in this case is to edit this configuration and just add the following in between:

ip4:40.113.112.27

By adding this, you 're essentially approving the IP address 40.113.112.27 (hoteliga's e-mail server) to send e-mails on your behalf. After doing that, save the changes in your DNS setup.

You should be able to send e-mails from within the hoteliga PMS and the hoteliga booking engine (if activated) without any problems.