Dealing with emails can be a real problem, as different email hosts change their rules all the time. To make things easy for our customers, we had a “email spoof” set up on your reservation emails, which is explained below.
When someone does a reservation, the Vantora system sends out an email as a confirmation. It also sends a copy to your business at the address set in the admin email settings area. To make it easy for responses, we spoof the email address going to the customer. It says that it came from your email – when in fact, it came from the Vantora email server. That way, if the customer hits “reply” to the email to ask an additional question, that email comes to you.
We also spoof the one that comes to the field, showing it in fact, that it came from the customer. Assume the user asked the question in their user notes, “Can we bring pizza??” You can hit reply and it goes straight back to the customer.
But, there is a problem!
Some of the email providers, like Yahoo, have tightened up their rules to try to stop “phishing.” Some dishonest people on the web will make an email that looks like it comes from your credit card provider, then send an email saying you need to log in to your credit card account to check recent activity. They include a link in the email that is close to your credit card company’s email address – but not the same…. with a fake login screen asking you to put in your credit card number and password. They might ask for other data to “prove you are who you say you are,” such as your mother’s maiden name, social security number, etc.
In order to try to prevent these types of phishing frauds, some email servers will automatically stop any email where the “from” on the address does not match the header data on where it actually originated. Thus, the problem! For example, if someone has a Yahoo address, Yahoo might stop the confirmation email, because they see an incoming email that says it’s from info@bobspaintball.com, but the header says it’s from the Vantora email servers.
The Solution
There is a multi-step solution to this problem.
One is making sure the field gets their copy. If you go into your Admin –> Settings –> Email Settings –> Confirmation you will see there is an option for having your email show that it is coming from the customer’s email. By default, we have this checked. If you uncheck that box, your confirmation emails will now come from no-reply@vantora.com So, do not hit reply to talk to the customer, but instead, get their email from the admin screen to email them.
The other half of the equation is making sure the Vantora confirmation (and reminder) emails make it to the customer. To do that, you will need a Vantora email account. We will set that up for you free of charge. You just have to contact us and let us know you want it. We will then set up a Vantora account with Your-Field-Name@Vantora.com Obviously, if we have more than one field with the same name, we may need to adjust the account. For example, if there are two Bob’s Paintball – one may be bobsPaintball@vantora.com and the next one will have to be BobsPaintballField@vantora.com This really won’t matter much, and will only be on Vantora. We will set up an auto forward from that email to your present email.
Let’s look at an example:
The email is set to reservations@gatsplat.com. We create a new one called gatsplat@vantora.com that gets auto forwarded to reservations@gatsplat.com with all spam filtering turned off, and auto delete upon forward. When a reservation is made, the customer sees it came from gatsplat@vantora.com, which the filters are happy with. The customer hits return and asks a question about bringing their pizza. Their message goes to gatsplat@vantora.com and as soon as it arrives, it is forwarded to reservations@gatsplat.com; coming from gatsplat@vantora.com and then is instantly deleted from the Vantora email server. Eaveryone gets the email they need, and the spam and phishing filters are happy.
If you would like us to set up a Vantora email address for you, just contact us, and we will get it set up for you.
