How A Vendor Can Send Email From SNC

Some departments on campus contract with an outside vendor for services that include sending email on behalf of the department. If you have this need, please think about it carefully.

Do you really need this?

You may think that sending emails from an SNC email address is automatically a good thing, but that's not necessarily true. The underlying problem is that by doing this, you're allowing a company that is not SNC to identify themselves as SNC when they send email, and this can cause problems with spam settings. Each user with an SNC email address controls their own Inbox, deciding for themselves what is and is not spam. When a user receives an email that says it's from SNC and the message really isn't, this increases the likelihood that they'll mark it as spam (which then decreases the chances of future emails making it to their Inbox).

As an example, we use a status web page to communicate information about the status of technical systems on campus. This web page allows you to subscribe to updates, so that you receive an email each time we post something about an outage.

The company whose system we use is called Statuspage, so it's actually their servers sending the emails, not ours. And when you receive such an email, you'll notice that it comes from "notify@statuspage.io". You might think that it's better if those emails come from something like "its@snc.edu". But we intentionally do not send those from an SNC address because it's not actually SNC sending the email. It's Statuspage sending the email.

So, we recommend you think this through and decide if you really want to send the emails from an SNC address, even though they are not coming from SNC.

Configuration Steps

If you want to go forward with having a vendor send email as SNC, an employee from the department must make the request by sending an email to "servicedesk@snc.edu". In the request, explain your project/activity and include the following information:

• name of the vendor
• IP address of the sending email server (the vendor will have this)
• duration of the need (only temporary for one semester, long term contract, etc.)
• intended audience of the emails (i.e. all campus users, students only, etc)

If the vendor provides a PDF document or a web page with the necessary information, just include that with the email. Please make this request at least two weeks prior to the need.

After an ITS staff member has configured our service to accept this email, the vendor must then configure their email server to use Google's SMTP relay server. Here are the specs:

• Hostname: smtp-relay.gmail.com
• Port: 25
• TLS: not required

Any such vendor will know how to use the above settings.

If we were to allow a vendor to send email without these settings, your email messages are more likely to include those warnings from Gmail about the authenticity of the sender.

If you'd like to discuss your needs in more detail, just let us know.

Additional resources:

• How does whitelisting work?