Do you want to be a part of future pilots? Sign up to our research group here.
Communicating with your clients is an activity you do all day, every day, and emailing is an important part of that. To send emails from Animana directly, you must complete the email settings. This article will explain how to set up your outgoing email settings in Animana when your practice does not have its own domain name.
If you do have a domain name, which you’d like to send emails from, please see our article here.
Note that when you follow these steps, your recipients will receive emails from the default info@veterinarymail.com.
Before you start
You need administrator permission to be able to setup outgoing email. Permissions can be adjusted by practice administrators in Settings > General Settings > Role Management.
Step-by-step instructions
- Go to Settings > General Settings > Outgoing Email.
- In the “Delivery notifications email” field, enter the email address for bounce and spam complaint notifications. Why this matters.
- Click Save.
You can now send emails from Animana and safely navigate away from this page.
More about this
Why would I want to receive notifications about bounces and spam complaints?
A “bounce” means an email you sent could not be delivered. For example, because the client mistyped their email address, their mailbox is full, or their mail server rejected it.
A “spam complaint” means a client marked one of your emails as spam.
These “Delivery notifications” are usually the only way you will find out that a client never received an appointment reminder or an invoice, so use an email address that someone in the practice actually monitors. Repeated bounces and spam complaints also damage the domain’s reputation, which makes it more likely that your future emails land in clients’ spam folders.
The terminology explained
When explaining how to set up outgoing e-mail, a lot of terminology is used. Below is a list of terms and their explanation.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Domain | Your address on the internet, such as example.com. If you imagine the internet is a big city with millions of houses (websites). Each house has its own address (domain name). |
| Subdomain | A separate section of your domain, written in front of it. For example mail.example.com. Think of it as a separate entrance to the same building, with its own nameplate. |
| Domain name provider | The company you rent your domain name from, and where you manage its settings. Like the estate agent that sold you the address (domain name). They don't build the house (website), but they control who the address belongs to. |
| Website provider | The company that hosts and runs your website. The builder rather than the estate agent. Often, but not always, the same company as your domain name provider. |
| DNS records | DNS records, or Domain Name System records, are settings at your domain name provider that tell the internet where to send traffic and email for your domain. Like the signposts at the entrance to your street. |
| CNAME record | A CNAME record, or Canonical Name record, is a DNS record that points one name at another name. A signpost saying "this way to…". |
| MX record | MX records, or Mail Exchange records, are DNS records that say which mail server receives email for your domain. A note on the signpost saying where to deliver the post. |
| SPF record | An SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record is a DNS record listing which mail servers are allowed to send email using your domain. It is what stops someone else from sending email that looks like it came from you, and what tells the receiving side that Animana is allowed to send on your behalf. |
| DMARC record | DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is a DNS record that tells email providers what to do with messages that only pretend to come from your domain: reject them, hold them as spam, or let them through and report back. It's like a note telling the mail carrier how to handle letters that aren't really from your house. You can only ever post one such note. Otherwise, the mail carrier gets confused and just ignores both notes and lets all the letters through. |
| Bounce | An email that could not be delivered and came back. Usually a wrong or full mailbox, or a receiving server that refused it. |
| Spam complaint | A recipient marked your email as spam in their mail program. Their provider reports this back, and too many complaints make it harder for all your emails to reach clients' inboxes. |