How to give volunteer.legal permission to send your organization's emails

Volunteer.legal acts as a bulk email provider in that it sends out a massive amount of emails on your behalf:

* to invite volunteers to a workshop
* to confirm the volunteers that sign up for a workshop
* to send out logistics emails
* to send out reminder emails
* etc

When I say that it sends out emails on your behalf, I mean that it will send an email where the "from" address is your email address. When someone receives that email, lets say on Gmail, the receiver's email service will check it for spam. A standard spam check is to go to the domain (read: "website") associated with the email address, and check to make sure that it gave permission for the email to be sent. Until your organization has followed the instructions on this page, your organization's domain has not given volunteer.legal permission to send out emails on its behalf. This is a big red flag for spam filters, and makes your emails much more likely to be marked as spam.

Fortunately, it's easy for someone with administrative privileges on your organization's domain to give volunteer.legal permission to send emails.

What you're going to want to do is to send whoever administers your organization's domain (read: "website") an email that includes a link to this page. Hopefully, they're a tech person and can read this page, understand what's going on, and follow these instructions quickly. If they're not / can't understand this, John Carroll is willing to talk with them on the phone and explain what needs to be done and how to do it--it's pretty simple, as far as technology goes.

#### ***Confused by my use of the term "domain"?***

*You have a work email address associated with the organization that employees you. For example, if I worked at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, I might have an email address in the form "jcarroll@ilrc.org" (I don't). The domain associated with the email address is whatever follows the "@" symbol. In this case, "ilrc.org".*

*If volunteer.legal sends an email from "jcarroll@ilrc.org", the recipient's email provider will navigate to "ilrc.org" and check to make sure that "ilrc.org" gave permission for "volunteer.legal" to send an email with the "from" address listed as "@ilrc.org". Typically, when "Website A" sends an email, it sends the email with the "from" address being "from Website A". In volunteer.legal's case, it's sending an email with the from address being a different website (your organization's website). This is suspicious, and your organization's website needs to give explicit permission for it to happen.*

## What needs to be done

What the administrator in charge of your organization's domain needs to do, is add an SPF record to your organization's domain. This is a standard requirement for bulk email sending web applications. If IT is unfamiliar with it, they can read more about it from popular bulk email sending providers like Mandrill or Sendgrid or Mailchimp. They can also read about SPF in general on wikipedia.

* To add the SPF record, someone will need to add a TXT DNS record with the following content:
	+ "v=spf1 include:mail.volunteer.legal ip4:104.236.159.17 ~all" (not including the quotes)

If your organization already has an SPF record associated with your domain, you must update that file to include Volunteer.Legal (the internet only allows each domain to have one SPF record. Multiple records will be ignored and will do nothing).

* If your organization already has a TXT record with SPF information, they will need to add:
	+ "include:mail.volunteer.legal ip4:104.236.159.17" to the record (not including the quotes).
* e.g. If your organization already had a SPF record in the form "v=spf1 include:spf.outlook.com ~all", you would need to update that record like so: "v=spf1 include:spf.outlook.com include:mail.volunteer.legal ip4:104.236.159.17 ~all"

By adding this record to your website, you'll be telling email recipients that your domain gave volunteer.legal permission to send emails on its behalf and you shouldn't have any email deliverability problems.

After IT makes this change, it will probably take about 24 hours for the internet to catch up and acknowledge the change. Wait at least 24 hours, and then use volunteer.legal to send a test email to yourself & some collegues, before using volunteer.legal to send any emails to real volunteers.

If you cannot complete these steps, say, for security reasons (or because you're a branch of the government and no one from IT will help you out), you will not be able to use volunteer.legal with email addresses associated with your organization. One possible workaround, is to buy a custom domain name, www.example.org, and use that for sending emails. The cost of this solution will vary, but $10 a year is standard to buy a web url. Another possible workaround, is to get help from a partner organization that can realize these steps, and have them give you an email address on their domain. If you're part of a collaborative, and the collaborative has its own website, you also might be able to use an email address associated with the collaborative.

What if the email address I use to coordinate volunteers isn't associated with my organization? For example, it is a generic email address such as "@gmail.com" or it is associated with a collaborative website (rather than my organization's website) such as "@santa-cruz-nac.org"

Sometimes, the organization a volunteer coordinator works for doesn't have their own domain name / website OR a volunteer coordinator likes to use a different email address for their volunteer coordination work. This might be "@gmail.com", "@yahoo.com", "@our-collaborative-url.org", etc.

First, if your email address you wish to use is associated with another website such as "@our-collaborative-url.org," speak to the administrator of that website about adding an SPF record for Volunteer.Legal and have them follow the same steps described above. This scenario isn't a problem.

Second, you **CANNOT** use a generic email address such as "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com". It is against the Terms of Service you agreed to when you created the gmail / yahoo / whatever email account, and it **will** result in some of the emails you send to volunteers being marked as spam. ***This means that you may not be able to use volunteer.legal if your organization does not have its own domain name that you can use to send emails from (though read on for some work-around ideas).***

Some ideas for a workaround: you could purchase a domain name for roughly $10 a year and send email associated with that domain. You can enlist the help of a partner organization that is willing to give you an email address associated with them (if they can follow the steps to add an SPF record for Volunteer.Legal). If you are working as part of a collaborative, and that collaborative has its own website, you might be able to follow these steps for the collaborative's domain and use an email address associated with the collaborative.