How to Ensure Delivery of E-mails Sent Through the PMS with the new DMARC and DKIM setup

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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.

If You Don't Have DMARC Records At All

After successful log in, go to the DNS settings of your internet domain (e.g. hotel.com), create and save a TXT record with a name of _dmarc.yourdomain.com and a value of 
"v=DMARC1; p=none;"

Replace yourdomain.com with the domain you're setting up. Some domain hosts automatically add yourdomain.com after the initial value—contact your domain provider for any specifics.

If You Already Have DMARC Records

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

"v=DMARC1; p=none;"

the p property can have value of 'none', 'quarantine', or 'reject'. If the value is set to quarantine the mails that don't have DMARC setup will go to spam mails and if it is set to reject emails without DMARC set, won't be received and rejected. So the best is to set the value to none so all emails will proceed with sending.

Additional way that the DMARC record can look is 

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; adkim=s; aspf=s

The adkim indicates whether strict or relaxed DKIM Identifier Alignment mode is required by the Domain Owner. Valid values can be 'r' (relaxed) or 's' (strict mode).

The aspf indicates whether strict or relaxed SPF Identifier Alignment mode is required by the Domain Owner. Valid values can be 'r' (relaxed) or 's' (strict mode).

From our side we suggest both of this properties adkim and aspf to be set with values 'r' that means relaxed mode.

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 or to be the sender of e-mails on behalf of me". The content of the TXT record should be as follows: 

"v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all"

This command consists of the following parts:

  • v=spf1 Sets the SPF version that is used.
  • include:amazonses.com Allows your own domain as the MAIL FROM domain when sending using amazon the server
  • ~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 ip4:188.164.201.250 include:_spf.google.com include:amazonses.com ~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 the case amazon missing from the record to add: 

include:amazonses.com

before ~all like in the example above. By adding this, you 're essentially approving the Amazon server to send emails 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.

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