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Ensuring Email Delivery

Agile Ticketing sends many emails on behalf of other organizations for order confirmations, electronic ticket delivery, membership renewal reminders, and other activities related to our platform. These emails are sent from Agile but can appear with a defined email address of your organization in the FROM field. To make sure these emails get delivered and not marked as spam, an SPF and DKIM record needs to be added to your domains DNS system.   An SPF record defines who can send mail on behalf of your domain name.  A DKIM record allows email messages to be signed and verified that it has not been tampered with.

Even without putting an SPF and DKIM record in your DNS settings, Agile Ticketing will do everything it can to deliver your email successfully. Emails originating from Agile Ticketing will be from emails@agiletix.com on behalf of your defined FROM address. If a customer replies to an email, it will still go to your FROM address.  Once your SPF record has been added or updated, you can clear out the emails@agiletix.com from the SMTP Sender field in the SMTP Mail Settings in System Control.

If you’re not familiar with DNS records, no need to worry! We’ve collected a list of some of the most common domain providers and their instructions for how to edit DNS records. Just click on the link that corresponds to your domain provider; if you don’t see yours listed here, try visiting your provider’s website and searching their help documents, or contact their Support team.

Authorize senders with SPF

We highly recommend that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain. An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain.

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forged FROM addresses at your domain. Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message purporting to be from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.  For example, when a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether the server that sent the message was authorized. If the message comes from a server other than an Agile Ticketing mail server or another server listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server can reject it as spam.

If your domain already has an SPF record please add include:_spf.agiletix.com at an appropriate place somewhere near the end of the entry but before the "all" entry it if exists.

If your domain does not have an SPF record, some recipient domains may reject messages from your users because they cannot validate that the messages come from an authorized mail server. Please follow the steps listed below to add an SPF record to your domain.

Create an SPF record for your domain

  1. Sign in to your domain’s account at your domain host. Help me identify my domain host.

  2. Locate the page for updating your domain’s DNS records. 
    This page might be called something like DNS management, Name server management, or Advanced settings.

  3. Create a TXT record containing this text: v=spf1 include:_spf.agiletix.com ~all

    Publishing an SPF record that uses -all instead of ~all provides stricter security but may result in delivery problems. 

    To authorize an additional mail server, add the server's IP address or domain just before the include:_spf.agiletix.com ~all argument using the format ip4:address or ip6:address or a:exampledomain.com

    Note: Adding additional IP addresses to your SPF records increases the number of servers that are authorized to send email on your behalf, so use suitable caution when choosing what you add. (See Sender Policy Framework for more details on the SPF format and security considerations.)

  4. If your registrar also requires a host setting (such as @), see the TXT records for specific domain providers list for specific instructions.

  5. Save your changes.

Avoid adding multiple SPF records

Adding more than one SPF record for a domain can cause problems with mail delivery and spam classification. Instead, we recommend using only one SPF record.

If you need to authorize more than one mail server for your domain, we recommend that you update your existing SPF record instead of creating multiple records.

Example

v=spf1 ip4:83.206.106.17 ~all
v=spf1 include:_spf.agiletix.com ~all

This text will cause the SPF check to fail because there are multiple records. Instead, add the mail server's IP address before the ~all argument using the format ip4:address or ip6:address to add the server to your existing SPF record:

v=spf1 ip4:83.206.106.17 include:_spf.agiletix.com ~all

 

Allow Agile Ticketing to sign your emails with DKIM

DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is an email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain.  Once the receiver determines that an email is signed with a valid DKIM signature it can be confirmed that the email's content has not been modified. In most cases, DKIM signatures are not visible to end-users, the validation is done on a server level. If DKIM is used together with DMARC, or SPF you can protect your domain against malicious emails sent from domains impersonating your brand.  Unlike with SPF, you may actually have multiple DKIM records defined in your domain.  The first part of the record, agiletix is what designates the DKIM record for use with Agile Ticketing.

 

Create a DKIM record for your domain

  1. Sign in to your domain’s account at your domain host. Help me identify my domain host.

  2. Locate the page for updating your domain’s DNS records. 
    This page might be called something like DNS management, Name server management, or Advanced settings.

  3. Create a CNAME record with the Name:
    agiletix._domainkey
    Depending on your DNS provider you may have to enter it as: 
    agiletix._domainkey.yourdomain.com
    (Where yourdomain.com is replaced with your email domain)  

    The Alias To or Value needs to be:
     _dkim.agiletix.com

    Example record shown below:

 

Verify your SPF Record

Once you have added an SPF record for your domain as detailed above or if you believe you already have an SPF record for your domain and you would like to verify the record you can utilize the tools from MXToolbox.  The process to check your domain for the record is:

  1. Navigate to https://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx
  2. Type your domain into the input field and leave any optional fields blank.
  3. Hit Enter or click on the SPF Record Lookup button.
  4. Verify that the tool doesn't report any errors and that the record matches our best practice as detailed above.

Verify your DKIM Record

Once you have added a DKIM record for your domain based on Agile Ticketing's requirements you can utilize the tools from MXToolbox to verify it is correct.  The process to check your domain for the record is:

  1. Navigate to https://mxtoolbox.com/dkim.aspx
  2. Type your domain into the Domain Name field and agiletix in the Selector field.
  3. Hit Enter or click on the DKIM Lookup button.
  4. Verify that the tool doesn't report any errors and that the record starts with "v=DKIM1;"

 

 

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