Sporty sends many millions of emails each year on behalf of organisations that use the platform. Examples of emails sent by Sporty that use Sporty's mail servers include:
- e-Newsletters
- large group emails sent from SuperCRM
- emails containing a "magic link" for people to re-register
- confirmation emails sent once someone registers or renews
- invoice/receipt emails relating to financial transactions
- emails inviting people to join a squad or team
- small group emails sent from team managers and coaches
- system emails such as for user access control
- website emails when people contact via widgets
- and many more
Emails sent by Sporty are configured to show the Name of the organisation that the email is from. However, the From email address is notifications@sporty.co.nz. So, some people may notice these emails appear like this:
From: Highgate College <notifications@sporty.co.nz>
Reply-To: office@highgatecollege.school.nz
If a recipient replies to an email, it will be sent to the Reply-To email address, not the Sporty address. However, occasionally we are asked, "Why can't we use our own email address as the From email address instead of notifications@sporty.co.nz?"
The short answer is that the current method is the most reliable to ensure email deliverability. It avoids the need for you to perform complex configuration of your DNS settings that would otherwise be necessary to prevent each recipient's own mail servers from treating your emails as spam. When weighing up the importance of displaying your own email address against the consequence of your emails being undelivered or treated as spam, most organisations choose reliability every time.
The longer answer is a more technical explanation of how spam filtering works and why emails sent by platforms like Sporty use their own email address when sending email on behalf of client organisations (like school and sports organisations). Each recipient's (receiver's) mail server applies rules to identify if an email is likely to be spam. Typically, these rules give each email a spam score and, if the score for your email is too poor, then it will not be delivered to the recipient's email Inbox. Instead, it may be:
- put into the recipient's Junk folder; or
- bounced; or
- automatically deleted prior to delivery.
There are a number of factors that contribute towards the spam score that each recipient's mail server gives to emails. Over the years, various standards and practices have evolved to help recipient mail servers decide which emails to trust. These include:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - an old standard that lets the owner of a mail domain (e.g. gmail.com) specify which mail servers are allowed to send email.
- Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) - a standard that allows the sender of an email to digitally sign their email to prove that it came from them.
- Grey listing - a heuristic that some receiving mail servers use to slow down the receipt of email, on the theory that spammers won’t attempt to queue and retry messages.
- Black-listing - maintaining databases of IP addresses or email addresses that are known to send spam.
- Domain based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) - a specification that combines SPF and DKIM to allow email senders to prove that the mail was sent by them.
To improve email deliverability, platforms like Sporty ensure that each email is digitally signed and that our DNS settings and email server settings are configured in a way that is correctly aligned with one another, and that are compliant with DMARC standards. By setting the From email to an address that uses our domain, such as notifications@sporty.co.nz, we can fully manage this compliance because we control the DNS settings for the domain sporty.co.nz. This is the same approach adopted by other major platforms that send emails on behalf of clients, such as Xero.