Issues with email not sent

Software Support
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1

Our OJS site, hosted on a university domain for the journal, uses our university mail system to send emails. Consequently, editors using Gmail or their own custom domain email accounts are unable to send emails from the OJS site to recipients, as these emails are not being delivered.

We have learned that adding SPF records for custom domains to our university mail system is a potential solution, but our IT team does not recommend it.

Are there other options we can explore? Would configuring SMTP within OJS address this issue?

ojs 3.3.0.13

Thanks

2

Hi @deepakc,

SPF records are the correct mechanism for this. Do you have any details on why your IT team doesn’t recommend it?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

4

i saw the spf records in the editors domain however I am checking if this domain users are also having issues.

  1. Can we go with SMTP: thinking of configuring SMTP with editor’s domain SMTP settings? Can that work ?
  2. how can we add our spf records for gmail users?
5

Hi @deepakc,

The SPF records will be configured outside of OJS, so if you have the ability to configure SMTP through your domain editor, that’ll be the place to do it. You’d just need to configure OJS with the details for your SMTP server in its configuration file.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

6

I found out that the SPF record is working, as some emails are being delivered to the recipients. However, some emails are still being dropped. What can we do in this situation?

Here are a few questions I have:

  1. Can we configure a single email address in config.inc.php to receive all bounced emails?
  2. Is it acceptable to ask the recipient to whitelist our domain (e.g., abc.org) in order to ensure delivery, even though the emails are sent via our university’s mail server? Is there anything else the recipient can do to allow emails from editors to go through?
  3. Can we use a generic email address like noreply@university.ca to send all outgoing emails instead of using individual editors’ email addresses?
7

Hi @deepakc,

Some emails being delivered isn’t proof of a working SPF configuration; in fact, some emails being delivered but not others is often an indication that SPF records need to be properly configured. However, doing that is outside of my expertise, and outside of OJS’s configuration, so you might need to look to e.g. StackOverflow for guidance.

As for your other questions: I believe what you’re looking for is the envelope sender. There are several related settings in config.inc.php; search there for envelope.

Asking a receiving domain to whitelist your domain probably won’t be effective. It’s unlikely that they’ll want to do that, and there will be so many receiving domains that it won’t be feasible to chase them down; many of them will be outsourcing email delivery to commercial providers, who may not want to make sender-specific adjustments.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

8

thanks a lot of your help. It look like spf record are not correctly added. Will check with the editors to update on their domain.

9

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