Information for your IT

Spam is a constant source of irritation on the Internet, and some organizations take aggressive measures to protect themselves from it.

Our Auto Emails are mass mailings. It is hard for spam filters to distinguish between legitimate and spam mass-mailings, especially if they contain phrases that frequently occur in spam, e.g. "You have been selected" or "opt-out".

To avoid email delivery issues, use the information below to communicate with your IT team in advance. This will help ensure that your communications with participants are delivered 100% of the time. 

Information For IT People About 360-Degree Feedback:

Panoramic Feedback is a system that sends bulk email. It's central to your organization's communication about its 360-degree feedback projects.

Each message is a personalized request for people to respond to our questionnaires. Depending on the number of people involved, we may send hundreds of emails to your server on a given day. For some systems, that may be too great a load to handle all at once.

Here are some of the ways we can work co-operatively to avoid disappointing your people with disappearing email:

White-Listing

To prevent your users from seeing our emails as potential spam, it’s a good idea to "Whitelist" or "Allowlist" our email domains. 

Domain names: 360respond.com and surveyrespond.com.

Server IP address: 205.201.136.87

Rate-limiting

Internet mail protocols employ rate limiting on a per-message level. When a host is overloaded, it can stop accepting new connections temporarily. This acts as an indicator to the originating server that it should reduce the rate at which it sends messages.

Panoramic Feedback does its part to avoid overloads by making only 100 connections at a time. But we cannot predict:

• The capacity of your receiving mail server. Mail servers on the Internet vary from slow home servers to heavy-duty servers at major ISPs.
• The load that your mail server is already experiencing from other sources.

The best way for us to find out the current capacity of a mail server is for it to tell us when we are overloading it. Therefore, we recommend that your system close ports when overloaded.

SMTP Errors

An alternative approach is for your server to use SMTP error codes. This does not have the rate-limiting effect of closing ports, but it can cause messages to be rescheduled, which is often good enough. If you choose to use SMTP errors, please ensure that you use 400-series response codes (e.g. 421), rather than 500-series response codes. 400-series responses will cause your mail to be rescheduled, while 500-series responses indicate permanent failures, and therefore will cause your mail to be lost.

MX Records

It is a good idea to make sure that all the mail servers listed for your domain are active and ready to accept mail. At times when little mail is sent to your servers, a bad server listing may not have a negative impact. But when large quantities are sent, all listings are used, and two things can happen:

• The server rejects the mail. This will cause undue and unpredictable mail loss.
• The server replies with a temporary error, e.g. a 421. This will cause mail to be delayed.

In order to avoid this, please ensure that the mail servers listed for your domain are correct.

• Under Unix, you can do this with the command: host -t mx example.com.
• Under Windows, you can do this with the command: nslookup -type=mx example.com

Talk to us

If you have any questions about this, please contact our Support.