Email delivery and sender address

Every email Vizito sends to your hosts and visitors goes out from vizito@vizito.be unless you tell it otherwise. That is the default, it needs no setup, and it stays a supported configuration for as long as you like. This article is for the case where you would rather have your own domain on those emails, and for what has to be published in DNS before that can happen.

If you prefer not to touch DNS, you are already done. Leave the sender address as it is. Nothing in Vizito is switched off, no feature is lost and deliverability stays our problem rather than yours. The only thing worth asking your mail administrator is to let mail from vizito@vizito.be through, in case host notifications end up in quarantine. See Network requirements.

What a custom sender address changes

Once your own address is in use, it replaces vizito@vizito.be on the mail Vizito sends on your behalf:

  • the sign-in and sign-out notifications to your hosts, see Email and SMS;
  • the emails to your visitors, see Visitor notifications;
  • invitations and pre-registration emails, see Invitations;
  • the screening result emails, see Visitor screening;
  • sign-out reminders to hosts and the custom notification button on the tablet;
  • the email that goes to your visitors from the emergency list, see Emergencies.

Two things never change:

  • Text messages. SMS does not have a from address in the way email does. Text messages go out under a sender name we configure, and nothing on this page affects them. SPF and DKIM are email mechanisms and have no bearing on SMS at all.
  • Mail about your own account. Password resets, the link to set a password for a new user, two-factor codes and invoices always come from vizito@vizito.be, because they are messages from us to you rather than from you to your visitors.

Set your own sender address

You need to be a Local admin or Global admin.

  1. Open the Vizito backoffice and select “Account settings” > “General” in the left menu.
  2. Scroll to “Notification settings” and find the “Email address FROM” row.
  3. Click “Setup FROM address”. A window opens, headed “Email address FROM”, which holds the whole setup: the address, SPF and DKIM.
  4. Type the address you want to send from, for example reception@yourcompany.com, and click “Save”.

Prove that the address is yours

Vizito will not send under an address before it knows you hold it.

  • Normally, an email with a verification link goes to the address you typed. Open it and click the link, then press “Verify” in the window. Until that is done the window reads “FROM email address is not verified!” in red; afterwards it reads “FROM email address is verified.” in green.
  • If you are signed in with an address on the same domain, the step is skipped and the address is verified at once. Somebody with a mailbox on yourcompany.com is taken as proof for yourcompany.com.
  • A no-reply address cannot receive the verification mail. Contact us through the chat in the backoffice and we sort it out, or first verify an address you can read on that same domain.

A verified address is still not used yet. The DNS step below is what puts it on your mail.

Authenticate your domain: SPF, DKIM, or both

Receiving mail servers accept a message claiming to come from your domain only when your domain says that the sender is allowed to send for it. That statement lives in your DNS, and there are two ways to make it. The window says it plainly: your own address is used as soon as SPF or DKIM is verified, either one is enough, and you can set them up in any order.

Set up both anyway. They fail in different situations, and DMARC, the policy most mail providers now apply, passes when either one of them lines up.

  • SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain. It is one line of DNS and takes a minute. Its weakness is forwarding: when a host forwards your notification to a private address, the forwarding server becomes the sender and the SPF check fails at the far end.
  • DKIM signs every message with a key published in your DNS. The signature travels with the message, so it still verifies after forwarding and through mailing lists. It is the sturdier of the two, which is why the pair of them is the real answer rather than either alone.

SPF

  1. In the “Email address FROM” window, the SPF line reads: “You will have to add the following to the SPF record of your domain: include:spf.vizito.be .”
  2. Ask whoever manages your DNS to add include:spf.vizito.be to the SPF record of your domain. A domain has one SPF record, so this goes inside the existing v=spf1 ... line, before the closing -all or ~all. Adding a second SPF record breaks both.
  3. Wait for DNS to propagate, then click “Verify” in the window.

Vizito looks up the TXT records of your domain and checks that one of them starts with v=spf1 and contains include:spf.vizito.be. When it does, the window turns green with “SPF record is verified.”; when it does not, it stays on “SPF record is not verified!”.

DKIM

  1. In the same window, click “Enable DKIM”. Vizito generates two keys and shows a table of CNAME records with their “Type”, “Host” and “Value”.
  2. Publish both records in your DNS exactly as shown. The hosts look like vizito1._domainkey.yourcompany.com and vizito2._domainkey.yourcompany.com, and each points at a record we host for you.
  3. Click “Verify”. The window turns green with “DKIM is enabled and verified.”

There are two records rather than one so that the keys can be rotated without you touching your DNS again: we publish the new key on the standby name and switch signing over to it. Rotation happens by itself. “Disable DKIM” removes the records and the keys again.

What happens if you stop halfway

This is the situation worth knowing about, because nothing warns you in daily use: an address that is saved but not authenticated is simply not used. The mail keeps going out from vizito@vizito.be as before. Nothing bounces, nothing is lost, no notification fails. The setting looks configured, the recipients still see Vizito, and the reason is that neither SPF nor DKIM has been verified for that domain.

So a half-finished setup costs nothing, and it is the answer for anybody who cannot get a DNS change through quickly: leave it as it is and come back to it.

If you change or remove the address later

  • Changing the address clears the SPF verification, and the DKIM verification too when the new address is on a different domain. Publish the records for the new domain and verify again. Until then, mail falls back to vizito@vizito.be.
  • Going back to the default is one click: open “Setup FROM address” and click “Remove”. Mail is sent from vizito@vizito.be again immediately. You can leave the SPF include and the DKIM records in your DNS; they do no harm, and they are there when you want to switch back.

Mail still ends up in spam

  1. Set up both SPF and DKIM as above, not just one.
  2. Check that the address you send from is a real mailbox on a domain you control, not a lookalike.
  3. Ask your mail administrator whether your domain publishes a DMARC policy and whether it is reporting failures for Vizito’s messages.
  4. Where the default sender is in use, ask them to allow vizito@vizito.be.
  5. Still stuck? Contact us through the chat in the backoffice or at info@vizito.eu with the domain and one message that went missing, and we look at what the receiving side answered.