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

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Revision as of 11:52, 1 September 2020 by Dimitris (talk | contribs) (Adding SPF Records to Your Internet Domain)
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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 hoteliga's mail server which is specially setup for this purpose.

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

This e-mail server is monitored 24x7 and is setup to be whitelisted from anti-spam systems, as one can see here.

However, as hoteliga's mail server is sending e-mails on your behalf, it has to be stated somewhere that hoteliga's server is accepted to do so, and that it's not some kind of phising operation.

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 SPF 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 other combination of an ip4: prefix followed by IP addresses or an include: prefix with domains (e.g. mailgun.org for newsletter sending)