Standard: ISO / Mass-emailing and third-party sender

Purpose

  • To provide guidance and awareness on how to send mass email messages and meet the requirements of the Standard: ISO / Email

Scope

  • Miami University community users that need to send mass email on behalf of the University

Rationale

Standard

We recommend using one of the following mass emailing tools when sending quantities of email that would violate Google's sending limits. Google's sending limits can be found here.

 

Approved mass-emailing tools

  • EMMA: EMMA is an enterprise email marketing system used by Miami University. It is a cost effective solution that reaches your audiences in a place they may visit every day - their email inbox. Easily create beautiful branded email communications, with no coding required. More information about EMMA can be found here. You can:
    • Program and automate email delivery for optimized open rates
    • Segment your audiences for better personalization
    • Find the best message / content to engage your audiences through A/B testing
    • Receive detailed reports to help determine communication effectiveness with analytics
  • Qualtrics: Miami provides Qualtrics, a survey tool, for use at no cost by Miami faculty, staff, and students. Users can create and distribute their own surveys and gather information in support of the University's educational mission and organized goals. Qualtrics has been reviewed by Miami's security team and approved for conducting surveys at Miami. More information about Qualtrics can be found here.
  • Bulk Mail: IT Services maintains a bulk email server that can be used to send email to large groups of recipients. Access to this server is granted via an allowed IP address list. Interested parties should coordinate with their local IT support to set up a mail client that can be configured to use the bulk email SMTP server. Contact the Office of University Communications and Marketing by phone at 513-529-7596 or by email at UCM@miamioh.edu to request permission to use Miami bulk email. More information about Bulk Email can be found here.
  • Google Mail Merge: Users can use Mail Merge in Gmail to send personalized email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements to a wide audience. Google Mail Merge lets you personalize messages with merge tags, such as @firstname and @lastname. When you send your message, each recipient gets a unique copy of the email in which the merge tags are replaced with their details. Users can request access to Google Mail Merge by submitting a generic TeamDynamix request to IT Services. More information about Google Mail Merge and its limitations can be found here.

 

Scanning and filtering

  • IT Services will utilize Google's provided malware, phishing, and spam scanning for all messages passing through Miami's email systems
  • IT Services will utilize Google's provided scanning for executables and malicious attachments

 

Third-party vendors and service providers

  • Due to limitations around SPF, Miami significantly prefers to reach DMARC compliance with third-parties that send email using the miamioh.edu domain as the sending address to do so via DKIM signatures
  • The following request form can be used for assistance with configuring proper DKIM signatures with third-party senders: DMARC Assistance

 

Recommendations to avoid messages being identified as spam

  • Don't use false or misleading header information
  • Don't use deceptive subject lines
  • If a message is an advertisement, identify it as such
  • Avoid content and formatting that appears to be spam

 

Related Policies and Standards

Standard Administration

Next Review Date

  • 02/01/2026

 

Responsible Officer

  • Vice President for Information Technology & Chief Information Officer

 

Contact

  • Assistant VP for IT Services Security, Compliance, and Risk Management

 

Approval(s) and Date(s)

  • Initial Approval: 10/2/2024

 

DMARC Assistance Print Article

Related Services / Offerings (1)

DMARC Assistance