It is common for an organization to have internal IT security measures to protect themselves from unwanted “spam” emails and potentially malicious websites. In order for Communic8’s communications to pass seamlessly through these security measures, we recommend that your IT team add our IP address and domains to your safe lists (“Whitelist”) for both your firewall and email filters.
This is not mandatory to complete if your company does not operate a strict email filtering or firewall policy. However, if any domains or IP addresses are blocked, which the Communic8 platform relies upon, communication emails and content may not be received, shown or rendered correctly. Please complete the following 5 steps as outlined below:
Step 1: Involve IT as Early as Possible
Steps 2-5 (outlined below) can be completed quickly by your IT support team. But step 1 can take time depending on your organisation, and in particular, your organisation's security mindset. We recommend that you contact your IT support team early to give them time to properly assess our whitelisting recommendations and ask questions. We recommend having a meeting between a Communic8 technical staff member and your IT support team (please speak to your account manager for help setting up the meeting). We cannot stress this enough as it will allow for a smooth process moving forward.
We recommend that you contact your internal IT team and ask for a team member who is responsible for:
Network and email administration and configuration
DNS settings
Network firewall settings
Once you’ve established who can assist you with your IT configuration needs, please contact your Communic8 account manager to organise a kick-off meeting. Once your IT department has agreed to whitelist the Communic8 dedicated IP address and email and communication content URLs, proceed to step 2 below.
Step 2: Email Delivery
The following IP Address is used by Communic8 for email delivery. It’s critical that you whitelist this IP Address in order to allow for proper email delivery within your organization:
168.245.101.51 – This is our dedicated IP address and only used by Communic8.
Step 3: Email Content
Domains are used by Communic8 when sending emails to provide content such as images or links out to the actual communication message. “Whitelisting” these domains using a wildcard will ensure that email communications are properly received, not directed to spam, and displayed correctly. The domains listed below may be included in the headers and content of emails sent by Communic8. Please closely follow one of the two following methods of whitelisting:
1) Wildcard these domains:
communic8.com - This domain is owned and operated by Communic8.
2) If your internal IT policies do not allow for wildcards, you will need to specify each of the following domains and corresponding variable as follows:
link.communic8.com - This domain is owned and operated by Communic8.
cf.communic8.com - This domain is owned and operated by Communic8.
Step 4: Communications Content
To ensure your organization receives Communic8 content, the following domains must be accessible from within your firewall (either removed from firewall “blacklisting” or specifically added to your “whitelist”). The method used for delivering Communic8 end-user content is web-based. An end-user is provided with a link to open your Communic8 message which may come via email, SMS, a social link, etc., but the actual message the user will consume is web-based. It’s critical that the following domains are not blocked by your firewall, otherwise, your content may not display correctly or may not display at all:
communic8.com - Wildcard this domain so any domain that ends with this will be considered safe - This is the primary domain used for hosting content.
pa.communic8.com – This is needed to capture and display your campaign analytics.
cdn.communic8.com – This is used for the distribution of web application files critical to your communications.
cf.communic8.com – This is used for delivering images, documents, and video content.
fonts.googleapis.com - This is needed to display the text in the end-user communications and emails.
fonts.gstatic.com - This is needed to display the text in the end-user communications.
Step 5: Validation
The final and most critical step is to validate these settings. Once you have completed the steps above, you will need to validate the following:
You can successfully receive Communic8 emails sent to your organization’s mail servers. Please send a test message using Communic8 to an email address that belongs to your organization and validate that you can receive the email while inside of your organization’s firewall.
You can successfully view the Communic8 message after clicking the link in your email, and the message displays correctly (as it looks in the preview) without any missing images/content, or the appearance of strange fonts.
The 4 steps listed above are critical and should occur before sending your first planned communication. If this isn’t done, emails may be sent to spam and employees may experience issues viewing the content of our communications.
Suggestion: Great job! Now you can be confident that your email will make it to your recipient’s email inbox. But will they open the email? We can help you with that too. To improve your email delivery and open rates, we recommend that you send your email using a company formatted “from” email address. We suggest that you follow the instructions to configure your email address.
One more thing... if you're like us and want to be extra sure that all the beautiful campaigns that you've worked so hard on land in your recipient's inbox, read the "Recommendations on maintaining high delivery" support article. This article provides a 5-step plan which will most certainly improve your campaign email delivery.