All about frankly emails

We try our best to avoid sending unnecessary emails but there are a few that we consider being essential. 

To get all users familiar with the tool a welcome email is sent to all new users. In this email, they are asked to answer two test questions in order to get familiar with &frankly. 

When the first pulse is activated, users will get a question email including a link to answer the questions. 

If the user has downloaded the app, they can decide if they want to receive notifications via app or email, or both. If they decide to only get notifications via the app, we won't bother them with any more emails. 

If you don't want the users to get emails before downloading the app, you can change the settings. Go to Account > Company settings > Default settings new users to adjust this. This setting allows you to decide whether new users who are added and have not yet started using the app should get notifications via email when there are new questions scheduled or not. 

Results email

Results emails and notifications can also be sent from &frankly. The benefit of using results emails is that the managers and users get a reminder to have a look at the results and to start working with the reports. Results email will always be sent on Monday mornings when the results are available in the app and in the dashboard. 

Results email can be sent to all users or only to administrators and managers. To change the settings for this, go to Account > Email settings > Email settings. The system is defaulted to send results emails to administrators and managers. 

Keep in mind that the results visibility that you set when scheduling a pulse also determines whether a result email is sent or not. Read more about the results visibility in the scheduling section. 

Unfortunately, we can not send out additional question emails, however, you can send a new welcome email. In the welcome email, there is a link that leads to open questions. 

Press the button “Send/resend welcome email (preferred language)  

There are four different subject lines used for the notification email and the mobile app notification when new questions open: 

• Knock, knock! You have new questions from {{companyname}}
• You have new questions from {{companyname}}
• {{companyname}} has new questions for you
• There are new questions from {{companyname}}

The system selects one of these randomly. 

As an administrator in &frankly, you can customize the subject line for your account. 

Step-by-step instructions: 

1. Go to Account > Email settings 
2. Activate the button for “Custom email subject for new questions” and write your subject line in the empty textbox. 
3. If you want to have the same message displayed for notifications on the mobile app, simply activate the setting “Custom push notification for new questions” and enter the same text. 
4. Save. 

The maximum number of characters allowed is 800 but we recommend you to keep it as short as possible. If you want to add a customized headline or message in the question notification email, you can do that while scheduling. Read more about that in this article.  

To note: this setting only applies to the email and mobile notification that is sent when new questions open. The reminder email and mobile notification that is sent on Fridays at 12.00, to employees with unanswered questions, can not be edited. 

Despite our efforts to avoid our emails being marked as SPAM and ensure that all emails are received, there are occasions when emails are not delivered, and this could be due to several reasons. Here is a list of common scenarios and what to do in case you face any of them:

1. Most of your users are receiving emails, except for one/some users
   
   
   • Verify if a user's email address is correct:You can go into People > Users and look for their email addresses, if the emails are bouncing, the system will display a warning on their status indicating "Email not working".
     
     
   • Ensure users have NOT opted-out from receiving emails: You can go into People > Users and look for their email addresses, if they have opted out from receiving emails, the system will display a warning on their status indicating "Opted out from emails".
     
     
   • Make sure users are not deactivated: You can go into People -> Users and look for their email addresses, if they are deactivated, the system will display "Deactivated" on their status. If this is the case, simply click on their name and hit the "Play" button on the left down bottom side of their registry form.
     
     
   • Check if users are part of the group structure: Sometimes users are created but not associated to any groups, this means that even though they exist in &frankly, they would not be part of pulses sent to the company, hence, would not receive emails. Check the group where the users are supposed to belong, if they are not members of the group, then you can add them and they should start receiving the questions emails moving forward, including emails regarding ongoing pulses.
     
     
2. None of the users are receiving emails:
   
   
   • Verify the email settings for the company in &frankly:Go into Account > Company Settings (only possible for Administrators) and make sure that Notifications are toggled on under "Question status"
     
     
   • Whitelist &frankly on your email security solution:This will require help from your internal IT department. In order for us to be able to deliver emails we need to have "permission" from your email server, since we are an external domain. You can share this section with your IT department to help you permit &frankly’s emails being sent: Whitelisting.

Whenever one of our email bounces, we flag the email address with a warning message stating "Email not working", it looks like this:

To check if the email address is correct or not, please check below instructions: 

• If the email address is incorrect: Simply click on the user to edit the email address for the correct email address, when the system detects a change in the email, it will remove the warning.
   
• If the email address is correct: If emails are bouncing despite the email address being correct, it means that your internal email server is blocking our emails to that specific address. This is particularly common for recently created email accounts, (a new employee for instance). In this case you need to contact your internal IT to ensure this email is enabled to receive external emails. Once you receive that confirmation, please contact &frankly's Support Team (help@andfrankly.com) to remove the “bounce flag” from our system.

We always try to keep our emails to a minimum, however, we also respect when our users decide to not receive any emails at all, and this is why every user has the ability to opt out from emails on their own account.  

Opting out from emails does not necessarily mean that users will not get notified at all when new questions are available. Users that opt out from receiving emails tend to answer their questions via our mobile app, where they have app notifications enabled instead of receiving email-notifications.

Administrators can see which users have opted out from receiving emails under People > Users. It is also possible to filter their status on: "Issues" or by email address for specific users. The status of those users will be marked with a warning text, indicating "Opted-out from emails". This information is particularly useful when users sometimes forget that they have opted out of emails in the past.

All users can change this setting in their own account at any time by logging in to &frankly under Account > My Settings and toggling “Emails” on, then save:

Some email clients/services (e.g. Outlook/Exchange) disable showing images that need to load from external URLs as they do in our result emails. To resolve this, you can add help@andfrankly.com or the entire @andfrankly.com domain to the “Safe Sender” list (note that this might be a different setting than Whitelisting.) Depending on your email settings, you may also need to allow downloading images in emails.

Adding us to the “Safe Sender” list can be done by each individual user if allowed by the customer’s settings, or the customer may need to add us to “Safe Sender” globally through a Group Policy (GPO) so that it applies to all users in the organization.

See more details for Microsoft Outlook/Exchange clients HERE! (External link).

For various reasons, emails that we send to our customers can get marked as SPAM and either not get delivered to the end-user, or be put in a “SPAM” folder and not be immediately visible.

We have made a number of efforts to limit this from happening, including:

• We are certified as a sender via https://returnpath.com/
• All our transactional emails come from a dedicated IP-address from SendGrid, (that we use as a sending partner for emails) that we send emails from in our service (i.e. not used by others who may be sending SPAM), with a reverse DNS set up to confirm authorization.
• We maintain a good reputation with external email providers (such as Google, Yahoo, Hotmail), that over time have learnt that we are a responsible sender of emails and we are for instance not currently blacklisted anywhere.

We have also ensured that the way we send emails is configured according to best practices which includes:

• We know exactly who is sending emails from the @andfrankly.com domain - and we have set up SPF records that identify who can send emails on our behalf. Currently the following services are allowed senders of emails from the andfrankly.com domain:
• Google (Google Workplace that we use for our individual/personal email accounts at &frankly)
• HubSpot (Used to send marketing emails to prospects and customers)
• SendGrid (All transactional emails sent by the &frankly service to our end-users)
  
  
• We have set up digital identity keys for all the above senders via DKIM, so that any service that receives emails from these senders can verify that the sender is who they claim to be.
  
  
• We have a DMARC policy set up that states that if any emails are not coming from a known sender from the above list, or cannot be verified with a valid key, the receiving email server should “quarantine” emails, and not deliver them to the end-user. Effectively, this means no one else should be able to send emails coming from andfrankly.com and if they do, the receiver should rightfully consider it as SPAM and not deliver it to the end-user directly. This means any emails that are being sent out from us should be delivered and not classified as SPAM.

Despite the measures we take to keep our emails from being marked as SPAM, customers often have their own SPAM filters and email policies which may not rely on the industry-standard best practices we use, or they may have custom rules that regardless of our efforts, will mark us as a SPAM sender. If you want to learn more about these practices, please read this article: Email Delivery

For example, many internal corporate email filters will block a sender if they see an unusually large volume of emails in a short amount of time - which is quite often the case when &frankly sends out large volumes of welcome emails or new survey emails to a new customer who may not have seen any emails from us before.

In order to prevent issues with email deliverability or our emails to be marked as SPAM, there are a couple of actions that can be taken on the Customer side:

Whitelisting

To avoid issues, we always suggest our customers to whitelist (always allow) emails coming from us to be delivered to their end-users. If the customer’s email system can rely on our already existing SPF/DKIM/DMARC settings to let emails through, this is the ideal means of trusting email from us - as it may not require any other settings and are the industry standards to use.

If the above settings cannot be used to guarantee email deliveries completely, the customer either needs to add our Sender IP-address, or the complete @andfrankly.com domain to be whitelisted in their email system.

By IP-address

All transactional emails sent by &frankly as part of the service comes from one single IP-address that can be whitelisted, guaranteeing that any emails coming from our service is delivered. The IP-address & DNS name of it is: 167.89.91.15 (o1.sendgrid.andfrankly.com). Whitelisting any emails coming from this IP-address means emails sent from our service will be delivered, but it may mean that emails sent e.g. from us via other services (e.g. HubSpot / Google) could still be marked as spam under some circumstances. Since this IP-address is used by &frankly only and is dedicated to us, there is no risk that whitelisting the IP-address will mean other emails from other domains/services could be accidentally whitelisted.

By Domain

Another option is to allow all emails coming from the @andfrankly.com domain to be whitelisted. This has the benefit that it will allow all emails from &frankly e.g. also Marketing updates / People First newsletters, our personal emails - however it means that anyone who can “spoof” an email from andfrankly.com may also be let through. Since we have strict SPF/DKIM/DMARC settings, a modern email service should be filtering these emails out - however not all email systems have the full support for these settings, which means it may be wiser to whitelist the IP address instead if your email system does not support it.

Exactly how to perform the whitelisting needs to be assessed and made by the Customer (typically their IT department), as the desired method and actual steps for how to perform the whitelisting depends on the used email system.