The following article describes the most common FAQ and troubleshooting issues our customers encounter with communications in Arlo, as well as suggested resolutions to these issues.
Download the procedure PDF if you prefer to work with a printed document:
Mail is not being delivered to course registrants on your website or staff using your Arlo platform. Messages are appearing in the platform Communication Log, but recipients report they are not receiving any messages.
If emails are not being generated when trying to send manual communication i.e. using the Send email feature within a course, the email should open in your default email provider. If a message does not open, ensure your browser has a default email platform set and this is correct.
Possible causes
Your Arlo platform may have been configured to deliver email from an address in your domain. For example, outbound email from your platform may have a From address of sales@mycompany.com. When some of these messages have been sent to recipients within your domain, they may be denied by spam filters or other mail filtering security.
Resolution
- Check with the recipients to ensure that the delivered mail has not been placed in a spam folder by their mail program (like Outlook), or by a corporate spam system by their IT department. This step will help identify if the mail was sent successfully (but was trapped by a filter), or was not sent at all.
- To check if SPF records for your domain are a problem, review the steps in the article for checking and configuring SPF records for your domain. This article details what SPF records are and why they can be important when using Arlo.
If you have completed the steps in this article and continue to have delivery issues, contact Arlo support who may be able to assist further.
Incoming mail is not being delivered to internal staff, but is being delivered to your customers and addresses outside your organisation.
If emails are not being generated when trying to send manual communication i.e. using the Send email feature within a course, the email should open in your default email provider. If a message does not open, ensure your browser has a default email platform set and this is correct.
Possible causes
Your mail server may not be set up to accept incoming messages with a From address containing your own domain name. For example, a message from an unknown outside source labelled to be from your support email support@mydomain.com is denied.
An analogy is you receiving a letter in your mailbox with your home address listed as the sender – a message you know you didn’t send, so it’s likely to be fraud, or at least suspicious.
The mail server denying this makes sense and is good for security reasons.
From the email server’s point of view, any message with that domain should have been routed by itself as an internal network message, so to see an incoming message from an external site with that address is likely to be spam or fraud.
Resolution
- Review the steps in the article for checking and configuring SPF records for your domain.
- If you have an IT team that manages your corporate email, ask them to check if their mail systems have spam or security rules that might be preventing emails from Arlo from being delivered. Some systems have rules to deny any incoming emails that have a from address that matches your company's domain. If their systems are dropping these messages, ask if they can allow or whitelist emails from Arlo.
If you have completed the steps in this article and continue to have delivery issues, contact Arlo Support who may be able to assist further.
Select which of the scenarios matches your problem to review the best resolution for the issue.
Forwarded bounce or blocked messages from Arlo's provider Sendgrid are labelled as being from MAILER-DAEMON and these can sometimes be filtered out at mail gateways as spam or otherwise unwanted content. This means that even though all other Arlo (and Sendgrid) settings may be correct, you are still not receiving notifications of bounced emails.
Suggestions:
- Your IT team check to see if these messages are being blocked by your email gateway and if so, update the rule that is causing the issue.
- Alternatively, set up a new mailbox (e.g. bounce@<yourdomainname>) that is specifically configured to bypass any filtering and add you to the distribution list for it. Once this is set up, ask Arlo Support to reconfigure the bounced email notifications to be sent to this address.
Not all invalid email addresses will trigger a bounce notification to you, depending on how the recipient's mail server is set up.
Email servers can be set up so that if a spammer is to try emailing random email addresses at their domain, e.g. emma@arlo.co, the server will not send a bounce notification which would validate that email address to the spammer. This is quite common and will affect a number of users who have misspelled their name in the email address.
Where the domain is wrong, e.g. emma@aro.co, this will generally send a bounce notification.
Please contact Arlo Support with the email address that you want bounce notifications to be sent to, as we may have an old address on file.
Arlo uses a templating system to generate and send emails for your courses saving you time and effort. This means you no longer have to set up and send an email for each and every course, Arlo does all the work for you. There are around 50+ email templates that Arlo uses, with each email specifically designed and tailored to its target recipient. Each email communication Arlo sends, contains all the necessary information that the intended recipient should require.
If you have custom text/information that you need sent to registrants, you can insert special instructions into the Registration Confirmation email, you can learn how to do this here.
Arlo does allow you to customise the automated email design. You can change the email header and footer, fonts, colours, and images, you can read more about how to do that here.
If you wish to customise the wording and text, please send a mockup and the details of the changes you would like to Arlo Support for a quote.
Arlo notifies the designated email address (assigned at implementation - usually the key administrator) of any blocked emails that were sent. After an email has been blocked, you may need to correct the contact's email address and resend the communication that was blocked.
Read about possible issues with not receiving bounced or blocked email notifications.
Suggestion:
- Set up a special email address (e.g. bounce@<yourdomain>) that forwards emails sent to the address to one or more people in your team.
- Contact Arlo Support and request that all bounced emails are sent to this new address.
- Create an internal process to follow up all bounced emails. Where an email address is incorrect, contact the person by phone and ask them for their correct address. Update their email address in Arlo and resend the original email.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses. It helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing and phishing.
Contact Arlo Support to enable this feature on your platform.
DKIM implementation will require some technical knowledge to enable.