Occasionally you may have problems sending emails to employees. Our Mail Log feature is a handy tool to check for any emails that have bounced or dropped.
A common reason for email bouncing is the 550 error code "Use Mail Relays of your ISP". Basically, this occurs when the senders domain is the same as the recipients domain, e.g. the sender has @example.com and the receiver has @example.com as their email address. Depending on the settings at your mail servers end, it will cause problems.
The problem is that we're impersonating 'example.com' when we send emails, and so when we send them to another 'example.com' address, the receiving mail server at 'example.com' goes, "hang on a minute, we didn't send this to ourselves! Someone is trying to impersonate us and that looks dodgy and is probably spam, so let's bounce it".
There are a few ways forward in order to have the emails successfully sent and received:
The easiest way is:
1. You can setup DKIM within your business settings. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and is a method of digitally signing email so the recipient's email servers know it has come from a legitimate sender. See this article for detailed instructions on how to do this.
Other methods include:
2. You can relax the rules at your receiving mail server to accept mail that has a From address of 'example.com' but was not sent by 'example.com'. Before doing this we recommend getting advice from your IT department.
3. You can change the contact email address in the Pay Slip configuration to be something not 'example.com'
4. You can add sendgrid (the people we use to send emails with) to your spf DNS record. This is done by adding `include:sendgrid.net` to your spf DNS record - this would need to be done by your IT administrator