Overview
If you are using a shared hosted environment, the emails may land into the SPAM folder when emails are sent using your own email address support@example.com. It is a common scenario on the SaaS platform. When an email is received at user's end, the receiver's mail server can check whether the host sending the email is allowed to send an email coming from this email address or not. So, if you have set up the SaaS help desk as example.kayako.com and are using support@yourdomain.com as your email address to send emails, then you need to allow the Kayako servers' IP to send the emails on behalf of yourdomain.com. You will not face the issue when the emails are sent from the help desk using the email address support@example.kayako.com as example.kayako.com is hosted with us and mapped correctly to our servers' IP address.
Resolution
The SPF records must be correctly set up at your end. The SPF (Sender Policy Framework) allows a domain owner to create records in the DNS which indicate definitively about the servers that are authorized to send an email for that domain. If an email claims to be sent from within a given domain, but it comes from a mail server not listed in the SPF data, it can be safely assumed that the email is lying about its source, and it can be rejected as SPAM.
To resolve this:
- Set the SPF record allowing the SaaS servers' IP address to send emails on your behalf.
- You may check the SaaS server IP address by using the nslookup command i.e.
nslookup example.kayako.com
. You may also request for the IP address of the related server from support. - If you have your own SMTP server, you may insert the SMTP access details in the help desk: Admin Control Panel > Settings > Email Settings.
NOTE: For more information on setting up SPF for your Kayako account, please refer to this User Guide article.