System settings and Email set-up – SPF record
This guide will help you to confirm/complete the ‘back end’ settings of your database, including instructions on how to set up a SPF record, enabling you to send emails on behalf of your service’s email domain.
Confirming/creating System Settings (Settings > (System) Settings)
Here you will find a number of settings that need to be completed, each on their own tab:
- Settings – enter your service’s main contact information
- Username/Password – confirm whether or not the database should automatically generate usernames for new users
- Email sender – add a ‘send from’ email address, and set-up possible reply addresses (more information below)
- Email/text message signature – create a text and email signature for your service
- Hire contract & room schedule – upload templates for your service’s instrument hire contract and room timetables (see our Instruments guides for more information)
- Country/Language – confirm the country and language settings for your database
- Logo/Photos – upload your service’s logo(s) and any additional photos you may want to use, e.g. banners for email signatures
- User control and notification – select Superusers to be responsible for/in receipt of locked account notifications
- Enable functions – enable/disable Studyplan, Chat (within Studyplan), Live video (within Studyplan and student cancellations via the SpeedAdmin app
- Invoice template – add footer text for your invoice template (see our Finance administration guides for more information)
Email sender – set-up SPF (Settings > (System) Settings > Email sender)
You can set up a SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to verify and authorise that SpeedAdmin can send outgoing emails on behalf of your email server.
Important – This task should be completed by a member of your service’s IT or system administration team.
Understanding how SPF records work:
- A SPF record is a single line of text that declares which SMTP servers, other than your own, are allowed to send email as if it originated from your domain.
- This is accomplished by adding a DNS (Domain Name Servers) text record. (Think of DNS as a publicly accessible record for the internet.) This record enables you to state publicly that SpeedAdmin is an authorized sender for your email domain.
- When an email client receives a message, it usually performs a SPF check to verify that the email came from who it says it did. If there isn't a valid SPF record identifying the IP address which sent the email as a sender, some receivers might consider that email spam or a phishing attempt, flag it as untrustworthy, or not display it to your customers at all.
- SpeedAdmin avoids this by sending emails using our own domain when you authorise SpeedAdmin with a proper SPF record. Emails sent from Speedadmin should never be marked as spam.
- If you're curious, you can read more about SPF records at www.openspf.org.
Setting up a SPF record:
- The process of setting up a SPF record is different for different domain registrars. For example, here are the instructions for GoDaddy, Namecheap, Microsoft Office and Google Domains.
- If you've already set up a SPF record for another purpose, you can simply add a reference to SpeedAdmin to it. The SPF specification requires that you only have one SPF record on your domain; if you have multiple records, it may cause issues and rejections of your email.
For example, instead of having two separate records, such as
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
and
v=spf1 include:speedadmin.dk ~all
... you can combine them into one, like this:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:speedadmin.dk ~all.
Create or edit a SPF record to reference SpeedAdmin:
- Edit your domain's DNS settings to add a TXT record. The steps vary depending on your domain registrar.
- Speedadmin recommends using the following SPF record:
v=spf1 include:speedadmin.dk ?all
While we recommend using ?all because it's the least intrusive qualifier, you can use whichever qualifier you are comfortable with.