Alamode sending appraisal notifications – but not always making it to the user email?
I was contacted by a friend who uses Alamode Appraisal software.
The issue he had was two-fold.
When he used the Alamode platform to send a notification to a customer that an appraisal was completed – the customer did not always get the email.
The second issue is that he sends himself a copy to his business email. The copy completely stopped showing up in his inbox.
Upon investigation, I determined that Alamode was using SendGrid (a bulk emailing service) to send out the emails. At some point, Alamode had changed to this delivery method, and SendGrid servers were not authorized to send email on behalf of the email (domain) in question.
There were already SPF records for the older email delivery used by Alamode, but not for the SendGrid servers, now in use.
The fix was straightforward – add an additional record for SendGrid to the SPF text file in the DNS settings for the domain.
I added “include:sendgrid.net“, saved the settings, and then tested.
Email was then successfully delivered from Alamode, through the SendGrid servers, and then to my clients inbox on Zoho.
This will also help with intermittent delivery issues, be it a bank, etc.
Not all mail servers perform this check, but most do.
For a complete breakdown on setting up MX records along with SPF and DKIM, specifically using ZOHO as your email provider – but still shows why SPF is necessary for email delivery, see my step by step setup on this post: Start to finish setup of MX, SPF and DKIM using Zoho.