New Mission Manager Email Relay Feature

[Support]

Mission Manager has enabled a new email relay feature to mitigate the problem of emails being blocked by some email service providers as SPAM. That blocked message problem is known as DMARC, Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance and you can read more about it at www.dmarc.org.

Prior to this change, Mission Manager sent email messages on behalf of a user, with the user's email address. But the message really originated from Mission Manager's server so the email header claiming to be from the user's email address didn't match the true sender. Recently some pretty big email services, such as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and others, deployed the DMARC scheme to combat SPAM and many sent messages were not being received by Mission Manager users due to the mismatch with the email header. Some users felt compelled to change to a different email provider to get around the issue.

With the new email relay feature, Mission Manager will temporarily assign a relay email address to a user so that the email header of the sender and the server match. It will look similar to relay_xxxxxx@missionmanager.net where the xxxxxx is replaced by a unique identifier so the message can be responded to. If a recipient replies to the message, Mission Manager will route the message to the original sender. Due to server overhead, message replies can be delayed by up to 5 minutes.  Do NOT bookmark the relay address as it will time out after a period of time.

The new relay feature happens in the background. You do not need to change any procedures when sending a message. Go ahead and use the return email address that you would like to receive responses to. Please educate your team that the return email address of incoming messages will now be from the Mission Manager relay. Thank you.

[Jeff Beckman]

This feature is becoming very unpopular with my team.  Messages get sorted by sender in their phones and many can't change this.  As a result, they now have dozens of new message chains to sort through, rather than one from the SAR team.  Is there a way to have a fixed reply email address?  We have our own email system for coordinators that would likely integrate easily.

[Support]

The problem with the fixed address is replying back to the sender. As you know, we used to use the sender's email address which led to the problem of messages being identified as SPAM and not getting to the recipient. The relay feature solved that, but with the trade off of the problem you describe. You write of a workaround?  You can send details offline if you like, techsupport@missionmanager.com.  Thanks.