When emails sent from ARMS are displayed as being "Sent" or "Delivered", but are being reported as not received by staff or student-athletes, often times the University is blocking the emails from being sent. ARMS attempts to send on behalf of the user sending the email, using their university email address.
Universities often set what is known as a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) policy, which governs how emails being sent on behalf of email addresses are delivered. For security, Universities can quarantine, or mark as spam, emails that are sent on behalf of another email address (as is the case with ARMS emails).
ARMS supports two options to to improve email reception, as seen below:
Option 1: Adding the appropriate SPF/DKIM Records
Arms Software uses SendGrid as our primary gateway for sending and receiving emails. Some organizations have strict policies regarding who can send email on their behalf. This typically falls under the umbrella of DMARC https://dmarc.org. DMARC consists of two components and a policy
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - A policy published by the organization to their DNS records which indicates which domains or ip addresses may send email on their behalf.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) - DKIM lets a domain associate its name with an email message by affixing a digital signature to it. Verification is carried out using the signer's public key published in the DNS.
It is the responsibility of the receiving email exchange to validate emails and adhere to the policy that your organization has published. If your organization uses any combination of DMARC, SPF, or DKIM; ARMS or any other SAAS provider who is not connected directly into your organization's email servers will have trouble delivering emails on your behalf. To better serve our clients the following information may be used to work in accordance with your IT organization.
For organizations utilizing DKIM:
ARMS can generate a unique Domain Key which you can add to your DNS records. This will allow ARMS to digitally sign emails on behalf of your organization.
Both options should allow ARMS to adhere to your organizations DMARC policy without modification.
Option 2: Masking Outbound Emails
Lastly, ARMS supports the ability to mask outbound emails. Once masked, all emails generated from ARMS will be sent from the armssoftware domain. An example "From" email address would look like: username=abc.edu@arms.mail.armssoftware.com.
If a user sends an email from ARMS, standard ARMS email features, such as Reply Tracking and email replies delivered to their university inbox, will continue to work.
However, our email provider, SendGrid, does limit the ability for ARMS to forward new emails sent to the generated email address. For example, if someone emails username=abc.edu@arms.mail.armssoftware.com directly, not as a reply to an existing email thread, ARMS will not deliver that email to the appropriate address.
For more information, please reach out to ARMS Support at help@armssoftware.