The Blissbook system sends emails to employees on your behalf for a few reasons:
To send an invitation, either to view and/or sign a handbook or to edit a handbook.
To remind someone that they need to view and/or sign a handbook.
To send an optional, customizable email when you publish changes.
To send an optional, customizable email when you start a new signature round.
To send a special link they can click to sign in.
If your organization is using Blissbook's manager escalation feature set:
To send a bi-weekly email to managers listing their direct reports who need to sign their acknowledgement form.
To send reminder emails to employees who haven't signed from their managers or your leadership team
To send reminder emails to managers from senior managers or your leadership team to remind them to chat with their employees who haven't signed.
These emails are sent by Postmark, Blissbook's transactional email service provider.
By default, the account that actually sends the email is yourfriends@blissbook.com. You can customize the sender name and reply-to email address so that it doesn't look completely foreign to your employees and so any replies go directly to you.
You can also add a custom email account, which requires verification of your ownership of the domain via DNS records. You'll probably need help from your IT team.
The focus of this article is to help you optimize your settings and IT setup so that the emails described above are successfully delivered to your employees, and that after they're successfully delivered, the employee trusts that they are legit.
Note: The options described below are available on your Email Settings page. Click "Email Automation" in the side nav, then click the Email Settings tab.
*** Using Blissbook's Default Sending Account ***
If you are using Blissbook's default sending account, you may need to add it to an allowlist (fka whitelist) so that emails will go through.
Using Mimecast?
If your company uses Mimecast, a greylisting policy is likely in place for all incoming email as Mimecast adds this policy by default. This policy will delay all email from new IP addresses. In our experience, this means email sent from Blissbook gets delayed about 15 minutes before it is actually delivered to an employee's inbox.
This can be problematic at worst and annoying at best for employees who are waiting on an email that contains a link to log in.
The best way to eliminate this delay is for your IT department to add a Permitted Senders Policy in Mimecast for Blissbook. Follow the instructions here and use these settings:
Options:
Policy Narrative: The name of this policy. Something like "Blissbook" or "Don't filter emails from Blissbook" would work.
Select Option: Take no action
Emails From
Addresses Based On: "The Return Address (Email Envelope From)" or "Both"
Applies From: Email Domain
Specifically: pm-bounces.blissbook.com.
Emails To
Applies To: Internal Addresses or Everyone
Specifically: Applies to all [Internal] Recipients
Validity
Enable/Disable: Enable
Set policy as perpetual: Always On
Date Range: All Time
Policy Override: If you have or even think you might have other Permitted Sender policies that would be applied to or override these same emails, check this box
Bi Directional: Leave unchecked
IP Ranges & Hostname: Leave blank
More details on these fields are available in this Mimecast help article.
Adding this policy should take about 5 minutes for IT. If you have any questions, please let us know or read Mimecast's help article.
Allowlisting by Domain
If you are allowlisting email from Blissbook, we recommend you allowlist by email address or domain rather than by IP address. It is more restrictive and less fragile.
Blissbook's default sending account is yourfriends@blissbook.com. This is the Message From Address (Message Header From). You can allowlist by the entire address or all email that comes from @blissbook.com.
The return path domain is pm-bounces.blissbook.com (if you're using Blissbook's default sending account) or blissbook-bounces.yourdomain.com (if you're using a custom sending account/domain – replace yourdomain with whatever domain you are using). Some systems (e.g. Mimecast, see below) describe this as the Return Address (Mail Envelope From).
Allowlisting by IP Address
Blissbook does not have a dedicated IP address because we do not yet send the volume of email required to make a dedicated IP address trustworthy.
Because we don't have a dedicated IP, allowlisting by IP is not recommended as our shared IPs (through Postmark) may change without notice. You would also be allowlisting all mail from Postmark instead of only Blissbook mail. If allowlisting by IP is your only option, here are the IPv4 addresses to use:
50.31.156.96/27 (50.31.156.96 - 127)
104.245.209.192/26 (104.245.209.192 - 255)
Although we will try our best to keep this IP list up-to-date, this IP range may change. You can check Postmark for the most up-to-date IP information here: https://postmarkapp.com/support/article/800-ips-for-firewalls
Changing Your Sender Name and Reply-To Email Address
Click the Customize button next to the default sending account on your email settings page to bring up your options:
The reply-to email is the email address that's pre-filled into the "to:" field when an employee clicks Reply on an email they've received from Blissbook.
Please note, some email clients do not respect this reply-to setting. In these cases, replies will go to yourfriends@blissbook.com and will end up in our customer support system. If this happens, we'll forward the emails to the address you've designated in this setting or to another admin in your organization.
*** Use a Custom Sending Account/Domain ***
Granting Blissbook permission to send email using your own domain can be beneficial for a few different reasons:
You don't have to allowlist an outside domain to ensure emails get through.
Employees will trust the emails they're receiving because they come from your domain.
It may be easier for emails to get through to recipients if you're using a system like Proofpoint or Mimecast.
If you'd like to set up a custom sending domain, click the "Add a Custom Email Account" button on your email settings page:
After you enter in the email account and name, you'll need to add 2 DNS records. This is so Blissbook and our transactional email service provider, Postmark, can verify that you own the domain in the email account you've added and have given us permission to use it to send email on your behalf. Click the "Show Setup Instructions" link on the screen to see what you need to do.
Here's what it entering the records would look like in Namecheap's DNS editor. Yours will look slightly different depending on your DNS provider.
DKIM (Note: this screenshot uses example values):
Return-Path:
You may want to add a colleague from IT as a Tech teammate so they can do this, or you can copy and paste the instructions into an email to them. Feel free to contact us if you or your IT team needs help.
If Cloudflare is your DNS provider, switch the CNAME record from "Proxied" to "DNS only" when you set up the Return-Path.
You can use MXToolBox's SuperTool to see if you've set it up properly. If you'd like to see what a working result looks like, enter blissbook-bounces.rocketwhale.com and choose CNAME Lookup with that tool. You can also do a TXT Lookup and see all the TXT records on your domain.
Using Mimecast?
If your company uses Mimecast, an anti-spoofing policy is likely in place by default that will block Blissbook email sent from your custom email account via Blissbook's email service, even after you've verified ownership of your domain.
To fix this issue, your IT department will need to configure an Anti-Spoofing Policy in Mimecast for Blissbook. Follow the instructions here and use these settings:
Options:
Policy Narrative: The name of this policy. Something like "Blissbook" or "Don't filter emails from Blissbook" would work.
Select Option: Take no action
Emails From
Addresses Based On: "The Return Address (Email Envelope From)" or "Both"
Applies From: Email Domain
Specifically: blissbook-bounces.yourdomain.com (replace yourdomain with the domain you are using in your custom email account).
Emails To
Applies To: Internal Addresses
Specifically: Applies to all Internal Recipients
Validity
Enable/Disable: Enable
Set policy as perpetual: Always On
Date Range: All Time
Policy Override: If you have or even think you might have other Anti-Spoofing policies that would be applied to these same emails, check this box
Bi Directional: Leave unchecked
IP Ranges & Hostname: Leave blank
More details on these fields are available in this Mimecast help article.
Adding this policy should take about 5 minutes for IT. If you have any questions, please let us know or read Mimecast's help article.