Avoid going to spam - SPF Record

If you login to your system and see the error message - "Warning your email system has not been set up correctly", then your webmail server has not been setup to allow us to send emails on your behalf. As we send emails from our servers, but they appear to your customers as if they are coming from your domain, you have to in effect authorise this to prevent the algorithms at gmail, yahoo etc.. detecting that there is no permission and presuming that the email is spam.

Full instructions on how to authorise this can be found here : https://www.festivalpro.com/SPFRecord.html  it will be a simple task for whomever is in charge of your web domain. 

It is important to note that festival pro will send emails from whichever address is associated with the user you are logged in as. If your organiser is setup as person@yourfestival.com but a vendor manager etc... user is setup as person@gmail.com then they will receive the error message and will likely have issues sending emails. You should not use a webmail service like gmail to send emails as it is impossible for you to alter google.com's SPF. If this is not possible for all users you could create one account at your SFP authorised domain such as emails@yourfestival.com and create a shared user account just for sending emails.

Other Steps To Take

Again to note, these are things you should ask whomever manages your domain or mailserver about. We are aware not every working at a company is technical or has access to such things, but there should be someone who is able to manage this for you.

While implementing spf typically resolves deliverability issues, it is still possible to encounter problems in certain situations. It's crucial to understand that your mail server configuration plays a significant role in whether your emails are approved and avoid being marked as spam. Other critical factors include your domain configuration and reputation.

Besides spf, it's also important to verify if dkim and dmarc protocols are in place. These protocols safeguard your domain from unauthorized usage by malicious entities attempting to send fraudulent emails. By verifying the authenticity of an email, email authentication methods like these protect both the sender and recipient from various malicious activities such as phishing, spamming, and spoofing.

The actual email you send is also taken into account by recipients mailboxes before deciding to deliver the email and where to deliver it to. Try to avoid using language often used in spam email like opening with **CONGRATULATIONS YOU'VE WON** 

Best Way To Test Your Domain

Setup a new user on your festival pro system and input the email as what is given to you at https://www.mail-tester.com/

Then send this person a test bulk email, you can do this by giving the test contact a name like 'test' and then searching for test to bring them up and clicking bulk mail.  Different email compositions can have different scores, if you have a specific campaign that you are finding is hitting more spam filters than usual, you can try sending this email template. 

Wait for the mail-tester site to give you your report back.  

This is not what you want to see

This score of 3.1 is not so good. By clicking into this domain I can see they have issues with authentication as DMARC and DKIM are not setup on their domain.   Although SpamAssassin thinks we can improve the body of the text you can see clearly that the lions share of the dropped score comes from the -4 of authentication.  This is the most important section. 

What you want to see

Here is a copy of our internal festivalpro.com domain when an email is sent.  The higher your domain score the more chance of the emails being delivered correctly.