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Alternatively, you can provide your own STMP server details. Our system will authenticate with your server and send the messages. You can provide multiple SMTP account to increase the delivery rate and potentially overcome any your SMTP server account sending limits.
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Important Note: Generally speaking, we discourage using your own SMTP server because:
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If you have concerns, please consult with the AppArmor Support Team to determine the best configuration for your environment.
Steps for Configuration
The following fields can be modified in the Dashboard under Communications -> Alerting Mechanisms -> Email (View Details) -> Email Server.
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Adding a whitelist entry for the AppArmor SMTP server will tell your server that mail inbound from AppArmor should be allowed to bypass any spam or content filter rules. You can whitelist either our SMTP Server Host Name "alert.apparmor.com" or our SMTP Server IP Address "168.245.110.178". Please note that our SMTP server IP address will resolve to "o1.alert.apparmor.com" when checked through a reverse DNS lookup.
Microsoft Email System - Receive Connector
If you use a Microsoft email system, you might want to consider setting up a Receive Connector for best email performance. Microsoft tends to be very strict on sending limits, but we've had great success with this configuration.
Microsoft has documentation on this here. You can use the information above to identify our server. The connector should be configured to force TLS 1.2 connection.
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NOTE: We've received comments from our clients' email teams about the Microsoft receive connector. As we understand it, there's no reason to think that setting up a receive connector would make any difference in the performance of email sending. However, in practice those same clients have noticed a drastic increase in performance from setting up the receive connector. This is why we suggest this approach, because we've seen so much success with it. We discovered this solution through many painstaking projects of trying to get good email performance with Microsoft systems, and this has been the only solution we've seen work so far. We absolutely defer to you on the best way forward with your email configuration, but want to make sure we provide you with this information to make the process as smooth as possible |
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The reason we recommend this strategy is because we've seen our clients on Microsoft Email providers struggle with getting good performance. We've even had clients who, with previous vendors, had abandoned the email mechanism entirely because they were unable to get reasonably good performance. However, in reality, you're the expert on your email system. If you're confident about the configuration without setting up the receive connector, we absolutely defer to you on the best setup. Our clients have given us overwhelmingly positive feedback on completing this task - it seems it only takes about 5 minutes or so to set up on most systems. In summary, it's completely up to you if you think this is necessary or not. The reason we mention it is based on our experience with our clients having a great deal of trouble getting acceptable delivery rates in their Microsoft email systems, and that this solution seems to have solved all of those problems. We've even had clients tell us "we have no idea why this worked, but it worked extremely well". It seems that sometimes there are many different layers of email security on these systems, so it might be that there are additional limits that exist on top of the one that you outlined. Certainly we won't be sending any individual users more than 3600 messages in an hour! |
SPF DNS Entry
This is only required if the "From Email Address" is an organizational email. Not required if you use @alert.apparmor.com email address.
AppArmor maintains a DNS TXT entry formatted to the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specifications. The entry is listed within our DNS as "spf.apparmor.com". You can add this entry to your existing SPF entry as shown in bold within the sample below:v=spf1 ip4:111.111.111.111 include:
Please add include:spf.apparmor.com ~all to your existing SPF entry.
Please note that DNS entries typically take 48 hours to fully propagate.
You can check the SPF records to see if it’s there after you’ve added it:
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Gmail Whitelisting (Optional)
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