Employee Newsletter: Troubleshooting Common Issues

Below is a list of common issues that our customers have experienced in relation to the Employee Newsletter product and how to resolve them.

Custom domains failing to validate

We've received reports of domains failing to validate. Every time we've seen this, the problem was customers incorrectly adding DNS records to their provider.

Common problems are things like adding to the wrong domain or accidentally adding to a subdomain.

We can double check what values are missing by checking in AWS SES verified identities and see whether its the CNAME, TXT or MX records that are failing to validate (the domain isn’t valid until both have been validated). This online tool, https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx can be used to check individual values.

Common issues for specific DNS providers:

• GoDaddy

  • A common issue we’ve seen is clients adding the domain in the records where GoDaddy always automatically adds the domain. So they enter 4k3kavx7rptuqrdfqwfoe2ra7jdjjcfm._domainkey.newsletter.com resulting in the domain being added twice (4k3kavx7rptuqrdfqwfoe2ra7jdjjcfm._domainkey.newsletter.com.newsletter.com). The fix here is just to remove the domain from the record.

Not receiving newsletter emails

Often customers' email security software will block our emails or mark them as suspicious. The standard way to fix this is to whitelist our SES dedicated sending addresses.

Product: 54.240.71.135, 54.240.71.136

Data residency EU: 54.240.106.63, 54.240.106.64

Data residency US: TBC

Gmail marking emails as suspicious

We resolved this for Simpplr by setting our dedicated IPs in the allow list. Outline here: Add IP addresses to allowlists in Gmail - Google Workspace Admin Help

Unable to see images in newsletter emails

This usually occurs due to our custom domain not being whitelisted. To fix this, whitelist the Simpplr domain used to host images behind Cloudfront.

Product: https://assets.newsletter.api.simpplr.com

Data residency EU: https://fe-nl.eu.simpplr.com

Data residency US: TBC

Open tracking not working

AWS automatically adds a tracking image to sent emails. This image can be blocked by certain email clients. They will need to whitelist the AWS tracking domain: awstrack.me

Q&A

1. The CNAMEs have been added correctly, however I see a problem with the MX records; will the verification still fail?
   Yes, all the records need to be correct.