How can we help you?

By default, when your Xen.Ed site sends an email notification to your learners and staff, it will be sent from the email address "no-reply@xen.education".

While this works for most cases, we understand that it is important to apply your own branding across all your customers touch-points - including sending emails from your own domain and chosen address.

Please note that you may need assistance from your IT or your hosting provider to get this working, depending on your circumstances.

This can be a real address as well as an alias of an existing one. because we will need to verify it, you must be able to receive emails sent to that account.

Since this is what your users will see emails coming from, and could also respond to, it is important to choose an address that suits your scheme.

It may be also preferable to use "no-reply", if you elect to not monitor this account.

Once you are happy with your choice, you can raise a support request and we will organise the upgrade for you.

Next, you will receive an email asking you to verify your email address with our Cloud provider (Amazon Web Services). Select the link and you'll be taken to a Amazon SES page that will confirm that your email is confirmed. 

This will allow us to confirm that the email is indeed controlled by you and that it can be configured on our systems.

You then must ensure that your chosen email's domain name is configured to allow Xen.Ed to send emails on its behalf. 

This step is very important since most providers, like Microsoft, Google, and corporate emails will regard it as spam if the sender 's domain does not match the origin's server.

This is done by adding SPF or DKIM settings to your domain, from values that will b provided to you by the support agent in your request .

While it is fairly easy to add these records to your DNS zone, make sure to check with your IT or hosting provider if you are unsure, as incorrect information in your records could prevent your website or emails to function properly.

Please note: It may take 12 hours for new or updates records to propagate worldwide.

Once propagated and verified on our end, your Xen.Ed site will be able to send emails to your users using your own email address!

If you already have a SPF record (for example, if you are hosting your emails with Google Workspace) you'll need to merge our SPF record into your existing one, instead of adding a new one.

Here's an example of combining an SPF record:

Existing SPF record (example with Google Workspace setup): 

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

This would therefore combine into:

v=spf1 a mx include:amazonses.com include:_spf.google.com ~all

You can see all of your SPF records from your domain’s control panel. 

SPF records always start with “v=spf1”. Note that the merged SPF record contains, “a”, “mx”, and “~all”. Note in particular the “~all” part has a tilde. Even if one of your SPF records has “-all” or “+all”, merging records will require it to be “~all”.

It usually only takes between one and two hours for your domain changes to work, but it may take as long as 48 hours.

If your domain control panel rejects the Host specified in our email setup page, try setting the Host to “@” (without the quotes).

DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is an email authentication method designed to detect email spoofing by providing a mechanism to allow receiving mail exchangers to check that incoming mail from a domain is authorised by that domain's administrators.

The DKIM Host may cause many issues with validation. Please ensure that the Host is exactly as written in our email setup page.

If your DKIM continues to fail validation, you may need to remove your domain from the Host field as per the example below:

20160106203825.pm._domainkey.example.com

Remove the “.example.com” so that it looks like this:

20160106203825.pm._domainkey

Please ensure that the DKIM value is exactly as provided by our team in your support request.

 

The DKIM value must start with “k=rsa; ”. The line of numbers, letters, and other characters that follows is called the Key. Please ensure there are no spaces or line breaks in the middle of that key.