Survey invitation emails can easily be sent out to respondents using our Email Outbox feature. However due to new (February 2024) and extensive spam rules imposed by email vendors (Google, Yahoo, etc) sending of email can now only be undertaken on versions that support your own email account.
The versions are
Enterprise Solo and above, including all
CATI,
360 and
Market Research editions.
New Google and Yahoo sender requirements for 2024
Starting in February 2024, domain authentication will be more strictly enforced by Google and Yahoo. This is a good news story for the email industry and should mean better deliverability of legitimate mail.
Email sent through the Web Survey Creator platform utilizes the features required by these vendors. That includes authentication using DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
We also enforce the ability to unsubscribe and promote and require obtaining permission and respecting unsubscribes.
However, our platform processes millions of emails every year from the huge range of clients using the platform. The new rules mean that if a single client were to breach the rules, and send even a few thousand emails defined as spam to one of these vendors, we may see our ability to deliver email to vendors like Google or Yahoo is severely restricted or banned.
That ban would affect all clients on our platform. That would be a catastrophic event and one which we cannot allow if we continued to allow unvetted access to email sending across all levels.
While we continually monitor for spam events, and they are remarkedly few, we cannot protect against a customer with a poor email list who sends a threshold quantity of spam triggering email. It would be a case of "the horse having bolted" and we would not be able to "shut the barn door".
It is for that reason that we are removing the ability to send email from versions lower than Enterprise. That means Free, Student and Professional can no longer send email to respondents directly from the platform. In addition, our Enterprise and above customers will be encouraged to utilize their own email servers to send email.
If you try and undertake the scheduling of email, you may be provided with a message noting that you are currently prevented from sending email. Please feel free to
contact Support via our support system in order to discuss your current setup.
Setting up your own email sending
This can be setup within Web Survey Creator and will mean your email can come from your own address too, rather than a @websurveycreator.com email address.
Of course you will be able to still export all your respondents and this will include their unique survey and decline links. You can then utilize your own email system, a bulk email sender or other email platform to mail merge and send these emails.
Remember that commercial providers (e.g. Campaign Monitor, Twilio, Mailchimp) will all have guidelines in place that may require you to authenticate your email or validate your sender domain ("whitelabelling"). These changes are all designed to stop spam and increase deliverability.
For users on
Enterprise Solo and above, including all
CATI,
360 and
Market Research editions, you can setup a link to your own SMTP based email server. This will allow you to use your own server or one of the bulk email senders that allow "whitelabelling" of domain sending.
Go to
My Account and then choose
Edit Organisation
From here you can enter all the details to connect to your own SMTP server. Whether using a commercial provider or your own in house email server, you will need to provide the following details: -
- Server Name
- Port
- User Name
- Password
- Authentication Method
. In addition, you'll need to supply the
From Address, From Name, and
Bounce Address for sending of email.
