Email Delivery Report

All Forsta SaaS customers have access to the Fixed Sender Domain and Email Delivery Report functionality. This functionality reduces the risk of emails being treated as spam, and gives users the option to see the status of sent emails through the Email Delivery Report.

This means that if you are working in the SaaS environment, you will by default have either the “@us.confirmit.com” or the “@euro.confirmit.com” sender domain in the From field when you send emails via Respondents > Emailing. You can manually override this fixed sender domain by typing another sender domain into the Email, but you should be aware that in these cases 1) incomplete Email Delivery Reports will be generated, and 2) the emails are more likely to be interpreted as spam by recipient servers because the sender email domain will not match the sender server domain.

On-Premise clients must license the Premium Emailing add-on to access this functionality. On-Premise clients should contact their Account Manager for further information.

Note: There is no guarantee that Email Delivery Reports in Forsta Plus will at any time be 100% accurate. This is due to the nature of the SMTP email protocol and the way it is implemented around the world. A lot of ad hoc solutions exist, and there is no rigid rule-set that specifies which information a receiving email server is required to respond with to an email sending server. This results in that the SMTP code received from the recipient email server, which the SMTP sinks use to build the status in Email Delivery Report, may either be non-existent, wrong, or interpreted differently by the SMTP sink.

Due to the various implementation methods mentioned above, the Email Delivery Report can take up to one hour to be updated.

Tracking E-mail Status

When e-mails are sent from Authoring, additional headers are added to the mail. These headers are then processed by Authoring whenever the system receives a bounce-back.

When you have sent a survey invitation, you can later go to the Email Delivery Report and check the delivery status.

1. Go to the Respondents > Email Delivery Report menu command.

If you have sent invitations only once, the page shown herein the figure below appears.



Figure 1 - Email Delivery Overview

If you have sent invitations several times from the same survey, choose the Task ID of interest in the Task ID drop-down. This overview shows all the statuses that were registered for the particular emailing task, and how many respondents belong to each status. Note that only the status of the last sending per respondent will be at any time registered and displayed in the Email Delivery Report.

The following statuses are logged:

• BadMail – the SMTP server could not send the message because the email address is not valid.
• Queued – the email is in the sending server's out-going queue.
• ServerResponse - this is a transient status between Queued and the other statuses, and applies while the sending server is in contact with the receiving server but before the email is sent. When the email has been sent the status will change to MessageSent. If the sending server is then told that the email could not be delivered, the status will change to NonDeliveryReport. In most cases the ServerResponse status will be active for such a short time that you will not see it - if it is displayed for more than a few seconds then there is probably something wrong.
• MessageSent – the email was delivered successfully to the receiving server. Note that this is no guarantee that the email has been delivered to the users’ email account, just that the receiving server has accepted it. An email will be given the status MessageSent when it successfully leaves the sending server, and will keep this status unless a Non Delivery Report is sent from the receiving server.
• NonD elivery Report – the email was delivered by the sending server, but the receiving server has returned a Non Delivery Report. This can have several causes, for example the email address was not recognized by the receiving server.
2. To display the list of respondents belonging to a particular status, click the status link, or choose Show Respondents from the drop-down.

The Respondent Editor interface opens - . Here you can for example change the respondent’s email address if this appears to be the reason for the Non Delivery Report, and resend the survey invitation.

Figure 2 - Respondent Editor

Click here for more information on the Respondent Editor.

Recurring Batch Emailing Tasks

Note: If you have Authoring surveys for which you initiated recurring batch emailing tasks before the Email Delivery Report functionality was activated, then to see the Email Delivery Report results for these surveys you must deactivate the existing emailing tasks and set up new ones.

Using Your Own Domain on the Forsta Plus Server: Technical Setup

For Software as a Service (SaaS) customers to receive the Email Delivery Report and to achieve conformance to e-mailing standards, a valid domain name for e-mail dispatch is required. If you wish to use your own e-mail domain instead of the default, you must first obtain the domain (not from ), and then set it up towards the Forsta e-mail servers.

Existing domains may be used, but as the e-mail domain record must be pointed towards the Forsta e-mailing servers, this domain cannot then be used for any other purpose. For this reason it is recommended to set up a sub domain such as “surveys.company.com”, which will be used as the sender e-mail domain, for example “e-mail [e-mail]”.

The following steps are required to successfully establish your own e-mail domain to be used in Forsta Plus:

1. Obtain a valid domain for use as the base domain name and make the domain available on the Internet using a hosted DNS service or your own DNS servers.
2. Optional: If the domain is already in use create the sub domain that is to be used as the e-mail domain i.e. survey.domain.com
3. Add the MX records to the domain or sub domain that is to be used as the e-mail domain. To allow for fail-over should one server become unavailable, it is recommended to add more than one IP-address from different servers as the domain MX records, with different priorities.
4. Test that the chosen domain name now has the correct MX records.
5. Notify Forsta Support about your chosen domain. It will then be added to Authoring as the default sender domain for your users.

Log in, then go to the SaaS Tech Info page.

Note: Contact Professional Services [e-mail] for help with enabling your own sender domain.