Parent Communication Advice

Spam filters have become more rigorous in recent years, and are diverting legitimate emails into the spam/junk folders more often.

New Yahoo and Gmail Requirements

As of 1 February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo are implementing stricter requirements for emails being received in their users' inboxes. These new updates focus on better authentication and email relevance and pave the way for new mailbox standards that require senders everywhere to improve security.

If your email account or domain is not set up to match the new requirements, emails from the Discover SMS (that uses your email as an alias) will likely be marked as spam, thus potentially not reaching the recipient's inbox.

If you are not sure if your domain name has been set up for the new requirements, please use this link to check your domain name: https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc.aspx. Please refer to the ‘’Test and Result’’ section.

You can pass on the information provided to your email account administrator to update the requirements for your domain.

Please contact Discover support if you have any further questions on this issue.

Spam Detection

Improving the Invoice Email Template 

The content inside the email can cause the spam filter to recognise the generic/ standard template as an indicator that might be spam.

In order to decrease the chances of emails landing into Junk or spam folder is it best suggested to customise the Tax invoice Email template. This can be found under Centre Setup> Templates> Search for Tax Invoice Email

Below we have provided a good example of how the email can be avoided landing into Spam. Please try not to copy the same as it will again make it a standard template which will lead to the same 

Whitelisting the Email Address From Which Notifications are Sent

End customers (the email recipients) can whitelist the email address from which the notifications are sent from by adding the sender's email address to their Contacts or Address Book. 

For example, if your company is sending your invoices from billing@yourcompanyname.com, your end customer should add the email address billing@yourcompanyname.com to their contact list or address book to ensure all emails from your company are delivered to the recipient's inbox.

Configure SPF Record

If your centre uses your domain name for email addresses, which is a great idea, like accounts@mycentrename.co.nz, you might see a message when viewing your email that looks like this -

To help mitigate this and help with other possible issues by some email servers not accepting your emails from Discover:
Contact your IT person who manages your Domain Records -
Please add or edit your SPF record for your domain to include "include:sendgrid.net"

Terms to avoid

When sending newsletters and other Bulk Communications, avoid using certain words in your subject line and in the content.

Some spam filters are triggered by certain words in the subject line or the body of the email. For a list of spam trigger words, check out this comprehensive list.

Considerations

We do have some additional services available, specifically for those who are using their own domain (i.e. not a general Gmail or Hotmail, etc email account). 

You can add some CNAME entries to your domain so we can act as an Authenticated Sender - this will require a bit of to-and-fro emails to get the records set up - you may wish to engage Our School Ltd to assist you, let us know if you want to do this.

You may wish to also add a DMARC record as well.

https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc/details/how-to-setup-dmarc
https://www.esecurityplanet.com/applications/how-to-set-up-implement-dmarc-email-security.html