Email Sending and Tracking Instructions

Learn all about sending and tracking systems used for Staffbase Email.

Staffbase Email

Communication teams rely on Staffbase Email to inform, motivate, and inspire employees globally. Staffbase Email’s sending service enables you to target and deliver emails effectively to your employees. Each email includes an invisible tracking pixel that allows communicators to measure employee engagement. Staffbase Email is specifically designed for internal use, meeting all security standards, undergoing IT security reviews, maintaining compliance, and is trusted by major enterprise companies. During the onboarding process, it’s essential to configure your systems to ensure reliable delivery and insights tracking of Staffbase Email.

When you send emails using Staffbase Email, the translates the domain names into Domain Name System addresses, enabling Staffbase Email to reach your mail server. Before the emails reach your mail server, they pass through an . This gateway acts as a filtering tool, checking every incoming and outgoing email for your organization. It can block potentially harmful emails or limit the number of emails accepted from an untrusted sender within a given timeframe. The gateway solution must be configured with rules and policies to ensure that emails from Staffbase Email can reach your mail server promptly.

The mail server is the core component where emails are stored, sent, and received. It handles all mail delivery functions within the organization. In addition, your organization needs security applications that provide an extra layer of protection before the emails are delivered to your employees. Your employees access their email through various clients, such as Outlook, Gmail, or the specific email client used by your organization. This environment setup ensures that Staffbase Email is sent and received securely, with multiple layers of protection and proper domain resolution.

The DNS server authorizes Staffbase Email to send emails on your organization’s behalf and provides the required IP addresses for Staffbase Email to locate and reach your organization’s mail server. The common DNS servers are:

To set up the DNS server, you need to do the following:

  1. Add and verify company domain:
    To send emails via Staffbase Email, add and verify your company’s domain in the Staffbase Email web app. To learn more, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

  2. Add and records:
    Once you start the verification process with your company’s domain with Staffbase Email, you will be provided with the following records, which you need to add to the DNS server:

  • DKIM record: Signs emails for DKIM, allowing the receiver to verify that the email was sent and authorized by the domain owner, ensuring the content wasn’t modified since it left the server.
  • SPF record: Authorizes Staffbase Email to send emails on behalf of your organization’s domain.
  1. Allowlist sending Staffbase Email: You need to specify the domain used by Staffbase Email so that your mail server can allow email from the Staffbase Email. Learn more.

Setting up a secure email gateway or edge protection acts as a filtering tool for all incoming and outgoing emails. Common gateway solutions are:

Check with your IT and security team to see if you have an email gateway solution implemented. The implementation details may vary depending on your chosen gateway solution. A gateway solution generally enhances security by:

  • Limiting the rate of incoming emails from untrusted senders, particularly those that send a large volume of emails in a short timeframe.
  • Blocking potentially harmful emails before they reach your mail server.

If the email gateway is not correctly configured to trust Staffbase Email, you may encounter the following issues with emails from Staffbase Email:

  • Not delivered or delayed delivery: If emails are not delivered or are delayed in reaching your mail server and subsequently your employees, ensure that your gateway or edge protection solution is configured with the correct mail flow or transport rules.

    If emails take a long time (30 to 120+ minutes) to reach recipients’ inboxes, add the Staffbase Email sending domain to the allowlist for SMTP rate limiting or throttling. This ensures that emails from these sources are not actively slowed down.

    If updating the exception list does not resolve the issue, consider increasing the resources allocated to your gateway or edge protection server(s) to ensure there is enough capacity to process mass emails efficiently.

  • Inflated email URLs Links may be rewritten by the email gateway system, depending on your gateway setup. To prevent links from being rewritten and to avoid additional clicks being counted due to the gateway scanning, you need to allowlist the Staffbase Email URLs.

The rules and settings for your mail server are essential, regardless of whether an email gateway is in place. In some environments, you may need to configure rule-based logic in both the mail server and the gateway.

Common security applications are:

If additional security measures, such as Safe Links or Safe Attachments are enabled for your environment, add a transport rule to bypass safe link processing from Staffbase sending domain. This ensures email tracking URLs from the Staffbase Email function correctly.

Staffbase Email uses invisible tracking pixels to measure employee engagement. To ensure all images, including the tracking pixel, are automatically downloaded:

  • Add transport rules for security measures such as Safe Links.
  • Add Staffbase Email domain names to trusted sites and zones. For example, using Microsoft Active Directory GPOs or Microsoft Intune.
  • Allow automatic image downloads for email. Learn more.