Stop emails ending up in your junk inbox - Setting up DMARC or adding an SPF Record

If you have enabled the email spoofing protection features of DKIM and DMARC on your domain, this may cause emails sent using Arbor to appear in parents' junk folders (Often parents using Gmail or Hotmail services). 

If you aren't using DKIM or DMARC, this article also includes detail of the SPF record you can create to flag Arbor as a valid sender. 

To ensure emails sent by Arbor don’t go to junk complete the steps below:

Setting up DMARC

Step 1 - Add a DMARC policy (including setting up DKIM and SPF records)

The process for doing this differs depending on your DNS provider. For example:

Step 2 - Let us know the email domains you are using

Once you have added the DMARC policy, contact the Support Team if supported by Arbor, or your Support Partner if not supported by Arbor. Let us know what your email subdomains are (e.g. @schoolname.co.uk).

We will then be able to provide you with DNS records (specific to your domains) for you to addTypically for a trust, there will be a domain for each school, so let us know which domains you want emails to be sent as through Arbor. 

Step 3 - Add DNS records

Once you've sent us the email domains that are in use, we will provide you with a set of CNAME records to add to your provider, that specify Arbor is a valid sender for your specific domains. 

To add a new record:

  1. Go to your domain’s DNS records.
  2. Add a record to your DNS settings, selecting CNAME as the record type.
  3. Use the Host and Value fields we've given to you (these will look similar toexample.domain.com and example.domainkey.arbor-education.com) to create CNAME records with the first value in the Host field, and the second in the Value field. For example, in AWS Route 53, this looks like the example below
  4. Save your record.

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Step 4 - Let us know you're ready to go

Once you have added the records we've provided, let us know so we can verify everything is working. After that, you should be able to safely send emails from Arbor via your domains!

Adding an SPF Record

If you aren't using DKIM or DMARC, you'll just need to add an SPF record to your email policy, to state that Arbor is a valid sender. The SPF record is as follows:

ip4:50.31.43.182 ip4:168.245.59.25 include:arbor-education.com

Please note that this example does not include other SPF records that you may need to include for other services, such as Microsoft O365 or Google Workspace. For instance, a complete SPF record for O365 may look something like v=spf1 v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:_spf.google.com include:arbor-education.com -all

 

If you find that our SPF record pushes the number of DNS lookups over 10, we'd recommend adding the following flattened record instead, which includes fewer lookups:

v=spf1 ip4:167.89.0.0/17 ip4:208.117.48.0/20 ip4:50.31.32.0/19 ip4:198.37.144.0/20 ip4:198.21.0.0/21 ip4:192.254.112.0/20 ip4:168.245.0.0/17 ip4:149.72.0.0/16 ip4:223.165.113.0/24 ip4:223.165.115.0/24 ip4:223.165.118.0/23 ip4:223.165.120.0/23

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