It’s not always easy to confirm that messages have been successfully delivered to student inboxes when using commercial email providers. For example, in a recent NSSE administration a campus contact notified NSSE with concern over low response rates. There was no evidence of technical issues; however, after several days of investigation by campus IT staff it was discovered to be a spam filter. IT staff made an easy adjustment and subsequent messages delivered successfully.
NSSE recommends that you identify the person(s) on your campus who can monitor successful email delivery and ask that they check for delivery the day after a message is sent on the Interface. Messages that are returned (‘bounced’) are tracked and displayed for your review. Unfortunately, we cannot see if a message delivers to the inbox or a junk mail folder. Institutions that have concerns about delivery issues can opt to deliver their email recruitment messages from their own servers.
Campuses using third party email filters, such as Proofpoint, should request that the four NSSE email server IP addresses listed above be added to the service’s allowlist.
NSSE 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. We monitor response and bounce rates for potential problems during data collection and contact these companies if one is detected.
NSSE uses DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to digitally identify our messages as coming from our authorized senders. In addition, we utilize a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record which lists our authorized senders. Both are done to reduce the possibility of phishing attacks and spam from others using NSSE addresses and increase the deliverability of email as well.
NSSE’s DMARC and SPF information is as follows, which can be used by your IT staff. They can also use an online DMARC analyzer tool, such as https://app.dmarcanalyzer.com/dns/spf, to verify the acceptability of your resultant SPF record in terms of syntax (select ‘prevalidate an SPF record update’, then enter your school’s domain and the SPF record).
- DMARC record for nssesurvey.org: _dmarc.nssesurvey.org "v=DMARC1; p=none;”
- DMARC record for eas.iu.edu: _dmarc.eas.iu.edu "v=DMARC1; p=none;"
- Example SPF record: "v=spf1 a:smtphosts.uits.iu.edu -all" (note that a:smtphosts.uits.iu.edu is not preceded with an ‘include:’ statement)
If your institution uses G Suite / Google for email please review the following support documentation from Google and have your campus G Suite administrator add the NSSE email server IP addresses listed above to the allowlist.
• G Suite – Allowlists, denylists, and approved senders
• G Suite – Add IP addresses to allowlists in Gmail
NSSE participates in the Junk Email Reporting Program and Sender ID services offered by Microsoft (listed at https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/services.aspx). MS recommends the following procedures for helping NSSE emails be delivered at campuses: The mail administrator can go into PowerShell and create a transport rule to give our sending servers listed above a spam confidence level of 3 or less.
