Customers commonly send emailed Letters (such as Confirmation Letters, Group Contracts, Registration Letters, eSigns, etc) to Guests where the email 'bounces' or is 'quarantined' ie, is not received by the Guest. The most common cause of this is more strict email sending policies re: SPAM that many ISPs and email providers enforce. As such, you need to "allow" BookingCenter to send email on behalf of your website domain. When you add BookingCenter's email servers to the SPF record for your domain, 'undelivered' emails will no longer be an issue.

It has been common for hotels to use a gmail address, such as 'myhotel@gmail.com' as the From: on the email setting in BookingCenter.  But the SPAM avoidance of today's systems won't guarantee that BookingCenter is authenticated to send email for your specific Gmail account. What is BEST- and works in all email situations - is for you to use your own domain, such as myhotel.com, and SPF sign that domain so BookingCenter is authenticated to send emails for your domain 'myhotel.com'.  That way, you use an email such as 'Bookings@MyHotel.com' as the From: to send confirmation/self check-in/etc emails and the SPF record has been validated.  

If you wish to use a commercial email service (such as Google offers) for reciving and replying to emails - great.  You can easily forward all email from 'myhotel.com' to your gmail: myhotel@gmail.com to avoid having to change anything in your operations - all email will still be managed by your basic, free Gmail email address.  You just use your domain name to validate (via SPF)  that third party systems - such as BookingCenter - can send emails under your domain name and therefore the emails are receved by all your intended recipients. And it does look better to guests,that your enails come from @myhotel.com (such as bookings@myhotel.com).

Regardless, once you have set the SPF record (as detailed below), you must make sure the email used by MyPMS (set in the Setup Area | Site Settings area - 'email') uses your domain name, such as bookings@myhotel.com.  The domain name used must match the domain name with the SPF record so that BookingCenter is authenticated to send email on its behalf. 

For properties that choose this recommendation and use their domain-based email, and have SPF enabled with a hard fail condition, we recommend you add an SPF record for teh BookingCenter netblock of 209.237.231.0/25.  

A sample SPF record, if you didn't already have one defined, would look like this:

v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all

If you already have an SPF record, then simply add "ip4:209.237.231.0/25" to the record at the end of your current record and save it. This would maintain the ability of your current provider to send email for your deomain and add the 'net block' of BookingCenter to also send email for your domain.

Breaking this down, this defines allowed senders as any of the MX records (inbound mail servers) for your domain, as well as the IP address of the root A record of your domain, and any server in our 209.237.231.0 netblock.

If you aren't familiar with SPF, we recommend you use a generator tool like https://www.spf-record.com/generator that can pull your existing SPF record and allow you to make modifications. If you have an existing SPF record and aren't what to change, you can open a support ticket providing the domain in question and our support team can assist you in determining what to add to the record.  Please be aware BookingCenter doesn't control the DNS for your domain, and cannot make those changes for you.

For SPF authentication to pass, all these conditions must be met:

1. you have exactly 1 SPF record on your domain;
2. the record's syntax is correct;
3. the total number of DNS lookups can't exceed 10. 

Please look in your DNS entry to make sure there is only 1 TXT record, it is important that you don't have 2 SPF records.

You may have a situation where you are SPF approving another service to send emails from your domain, such as 'outlook.com' in which case the 1 TXT file on your DNS will have TWO SPF records:

• one for Outlook (which might look like: v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all)
• and one for BookingCenter (which should be v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all)

In such a case, the SPF record might look like this : v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all which will allow BOTH Outlook and BookingCenter to be supported via the SPF record.

MyPMS currently does not support DKIM signing of emails.

Updating your SPF records involve changing your DNS settings. Depending on the company that hosts, or is the registrar for your website (i.e. GoDaddy, 1&1, etc), the steps below may differ somewhat, but are consistent.

1. Login to your Domain and go to your DNS Records
2. Click ‘Add a DNS Record’
   1. Often you will be presented with a list, such as the first screen shot 
3. Choose a TXT record 
4. In the most DNS systems, enter the following:
   1. The Host Name will be blank
   2. The value will be: v=spf1 mx a ip4:209.237.231.0/25 -all
   3. TTL: We recommend an hour (3600 seconds)
   4. Click ‘Save’
5. We would recommend waiting about an hour and then you can check your SPF and DNS records at: https://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx.

 
Some additional recommendations

1. You can only have ONE SPF record. SPF supports multiple entries, but you can only have one (single) SPF record.
2. You can check your existing SPF and DNS records at: https://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx. Simply enter your domain (i.e. bookingcenter.com) and go to SPF Record Look-up. This screen will show you if the record is updated correctly (in green) or if there is a problem it will show in red and tell you the issue(s) that need to be corrected.