Tips to ensure successful delivery of xMatters email notifications

Are you experiencing xMatters email notifications being delayed, failing to be delivered, or ending up in a junk folder?

When a major incident occurs, xMatters can send out a lot of notifications in a very short time. This can sometimes be flagged as spam behavior by corporate email servers and spam filtering services. This article includes tips that you, or your IT department, can take to ensure that your emails are delivered promptly.

1. Add the xMatters alert domain to internal trusted domains policies.

Depending on your email server and configuration, you may need to explicitly add the xMatters alert domain to your trusted policies list.

2. Add the xMatters email address space to the end-user Not Spam list.

Most email applications - online and desktop - can scan for what they consider spam, and move suspicious email to a 'Junk' or 'Spam' folder within the application.

Users can usually create a rule within their email application that will designate any messages coming from the xMatters alert system as not spam, so it will be delivered to the appropriate inbox folder. The process for doing this varies by application.

3. Add the xMatters email address space to third-party spam filter services as a trusted email.

Examples of third-party spam filter services include IRONPORT, Baraccuda, SOPHOS, Symantec, SendGrid, McAfee AntiSpam, etc. These solutions often share the same filters to protect companies from malicious email.

4. Add xMatters as a trusted email to internal email spam appliance.

Depending on the configuration of your email server and any internal spam appliance, you may need to explicitly add xMatters as a trusted email source.

Additional notes for IT admins:

Email domain blocking

Occasionally an entire company email space will be added to a centralized email blocking list, as a result of a compromised user account relaying spam messages for some period of time. To prevent accidental blocking, add the inbound xMatters email address space to your trusted domain list.

Email authentication tools

There are a growing number of email verification tools available (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) that can be used to help troubleshoot mail delivery issues. Before calling xMatters support, it's useful to check the mail DNS, SMTP, and SPF records and see if you can work backwards to identify the issue.

xMatters reference: DTN-5186 Information supplied by Michael Casinha