Supported Options and Setup

As targetconnect will be sending e-mails out on behalf of Institutions, safeguards must be put in place to minimise false positive spam detection (particularly anti-spoofing). We support the following methods:

1. Dedicated subdomain with DKIM signing (Preferred - Industry Standard) – you choose a subdomain, and we send emails directly from our mail servers using that subdomain. We use both SPF and DKIM to be compliant with DMARC policies and achieve the highest email delivery rates. An example of a source address: future@careers.uni.ac.uk, where careers is a subdomain of uni.ac.uk.
   

Please note that use a cloud email delivery platform for transactional emails that will only support DKIM.

1. targetconnect 'From Address' - send all email from an email address like uni-careers@targetconnect.net. This way we can route email out to the world safely.

Without configuring DKIM signing or SMTP routing, emails sent from an Institution specific address will be identified as spam and our reputation will be compromised.

Bulk Emails and Transactional Emails

We currently process bulk emails and transactional emails differently, although both are required.

Bulk emails are sent through our mail servers whereas transactional (single recipient) emails are sent through the cloud based 'mailgun' application. This helps to ensure efficiency and speedy delivery of system generated alerts to your users and students. 

As such, there are two broad actions when implementing email integration:

      1. Bulk Email related DNS records

      2. Transactional Email related DNS records

The below information is split into the two main actions:

Bulk Emails

How do we set up a dedicated subdomain with DKIM signing? (Preferred)

1. Your team communicate with our technical integration team (targetconnect.integrations@groupgti.com) providing the following information:

1. Your chosen email addresses, we require up to three pieces of information here:
   1. Your 'From Address' (this is the address that users will receive emails from): ie future@careers.university.ac.uk
   2. Your 'Reply-to Address' (this is the address that the user will appear to be responding to). This can be left blank if you only intend to send emails from this address, or often it is the same as your 'From Address'
   3. Your 'To Address' (this is the recipient address for testing purposes only)
   

With DKIM, we highly recommend that you utilise an email address with a subdomain ie future@careers.university.ac.uk for routing emails from a From Address - you can still use a Reply-to Address like future@uni.ac.uk . 

1. Any timescales you would like to adhere to

Technical Note: unless absolutely not an option, we utilise DKIM as a preferred solution to email routing. DKIM is now the industry standard and will help us to support ongoing service improvements. DKIM also gives a better service to your users as the email will appear to arrive directly from your institution and does not require a physical routing solution or an @targetconnect.net address. The remainder of these instructions will assume that the new email address utilises DKIM with a subdomain.

2. Your IT team will need to create two DNS records:

	Record 1	Record 2
Name of Record	<subdomain>.university.ac.uk	mailtcex._domainkey.<subdomain>.<university>.ac.uk
Record Type	CNAME	CNAME
Points To	tcmailservice.targetconnect.net	To be confirmed at time of change

You can also apply a DMARC policy to this subdomain by creating a TXT record _dmarc.<subdomain>.university.ac.uk should you like to do so

3. We will generate DKIM keys and publish them along with SPF on our side, you won't have to worry about adding anything to your own SPF record

We use a 2048 bit DKIM key 

4. We will prepare our back end and test email delivery/signing for the subdomain we've set up

5. We will set up the service addresses (from, reply-to, to address) on the platform as per your initial instructions

6. Your institution should then conduct final mailing tests from the system

Throughout the process, our Technical Integration and Customer Success teams will be on hand to help

Transactional Emails

Unlike bulk emails, transactional email setup is initially handled within your targetconnect settings, and will require an operator to provide you with the DNS records generated from following the below process.

1. Sign in as an Operator
   
2. Click on 'Maintenance' (on the left)
   
3. Scroll to the very bottom of the 'Maintenance' menu
   
4. Click on 'Email integration'
   
5. Enter the domain you wish to use and click 'Add domain'
   

1. This will generate a number of records for both sending and receiving records. Please copy and paste these somewhere safe. You can highlight and copy the whole table, or you can print as PDF as a method of saving. You do not need to save the receive records if you do not plan to use the ability to receive emails back into the platform (for example, receiving an email into a casebook).
   

1. These records should then be given to the relevant team in your institution, who will need to add them to the relevant DNS configuration. 
   
2. Once the records have been added, you can click on 'Verify', and if the integration has been successful the 'Status' lights will change to green (you can also hover over them to see the status. If they remain red, please refer back to your IT team to check the configuration. If they still remain red, please contact Technical Integrations.
   
3. The next step titled 'Routing rules' relates to the ability to receive emails and is not required for this integration setup. If you would like to utilise this feature, please refer to this guide: Receiving emails into targetconnect

How many emails are sent and at what rate?

The operators of the system determine how many emails are sent. These include:

1. Immediate emails - such as password reminders and booking confirmations
2. Bulk emails - ad hoc bulk emails created and scheduled by operators

TC will send batches of 500 emails every 3 minutes as a maximum.

We haven't moved to DKIM and are using O365 and are being rate limited. What can we do?

O365 imposes some hard limits on how many emails are sent depending on the mechanism used.

Please note that we no longer support SMTP routing. Please contact integrations to switch over to a DKIM approach.