Technical Details for Adjusting Campus Spam Filters
- IP address of the FSSE mail-relay: 129.79.1.58, 134.68.220.35
- Sending account: fsse@fsse.org
- Sending speed: Messages are sent using a bulk email program that sends several messages per minute, as many as 30 for larger institutions.
- Sending window: Between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. EST on your scheduled delivery days. FSSE is unable to specify the exact hours messages will be delivered due to volume on servers.
Working with Commercial Email Providers (MS Live, Gmail, etc.)
Potential Issues
Commercial email providers typically do not provide transparency enabling clients to confirm that messages have been successfully delivered to instructional staff (faculty, instructors, graduate students who teach, etc.) inboxes. If your campus uses such a service, it means that in most cases you will not be able to confirm one way or another whether technical issues are impacting response rate. Once FSSE sends a message we cannot track delivery.
What FSSE Does
FSSE adheres to the recommended best practices as suggested by these companies, and registers our status with them as a legitimate organization so that our messages are not treated as spam. During administration, we monitor response and bounce rates for potential problems, and contact these companies if one is detected.
Campuses Using MS Live
FSSE participates in the Junk Email Reporting Program and Sender ID services offered by Microsoft. We are not eligible for participation in the Return Path Sender Score Certified Email service, however, because FSSE does not meet the criteria required by Microsoft. MS recommends the following procedures for helping FSSE emails be delivered at campuses using MS live: The mail administrator can go into PowerShell and create a transport rule to give our server, 129.79.1.58, a spam confidence level of 3 or less.
Working with Campus Proxy Servers
To maintain our security standards for the survey, we check to see if a reported IP address changes during a survey session. If so, we then rely on the cookies used during the session. We aren’t able to administer the survey if both a proxy server is used and cookies are not enabled. We recommend that institutions using proxy servers make an exception for the FSSE web survey address so that a consistent IP address is reported. Our survey support staff can work with individual instructional staff on temporarily adjusting their browser to enable cookies, but we would prefer to preempt the problem if at all possible.