In order to send emails through Full Fabric you need to set up and use a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) gateway.

There are 2 options that you can choose from when setting up an SMTP gateway:

The majority of our clients and the most reliable and easiest set up is the first option.

Go to General settings - Integrations - SMTP gateways to manage your SMTP gateways

Click on the "Create a new gateway" button and choose between the options as mentioned above and enter a domain from which you want to send emails e.g. "your-university.edu" if your email address is jane_doe@your-university.edu.

Full Fabric recommends under all circumstances to use an Amazon Web Service (AWS) SMTP to send your emails rather than your institution's internal SMTP unless it is absolutely unavoidable due to current institution policy. This is because in order to send thousands of emails in a timely manner without any issue it is essential that you use a respected global platform such as AWS to dispatch your emails. University SMTPs are not designed to handle dispatching large marketing campaign emails to thousands of recipients, and the emails fail and are not delivered. These issues then need to be solved by your university's IT team responsible for managing your institution's SMTP

In order for us AWS to send emails on behalf of your domain e.g. "your-university.edu" you must give the AWS SMTP gateway authorisation from your Domain Name Server (DNS). This will ensure compliance with the email authentication protocol Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and will reduce the likelihood that your emails are marked as spam.

Complying with DMARC involves the help of your IT team, or whoever is responsible for managing your DNS, as they will need to add records to your DNS in order to comply with DMARC. Full Fabric allows you to comply with DMARC through the 3 following methods:

When you edit your AWS SMTP gateway you will see the page in the screenshot below.

This page contains the instructions and DNS records that your IT department will need to add to your DNS, so please copy and share this with them and ask them to add these records to your DNS. Note: Please make sure to copy and paste this information to them, rather than take a screenshot, so they can copy the text and add it to the DNS.

Please also make sure to define the "default sender name" and "default sender email" in the inputs at the bottom, for the cases where an email sender for an email is not defined.

Custom MAIL FROM domain verification is a new additional verification option which is optional but recommended to ensure additional compliance with DMARC and further improve your email deliverability.

To set this up you will need to ask your IT team which subdomain should be used for the custom MAIL FROM domain. The subdomain should:

Please share the following AWS article for more detail - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/mail-from.html.

Once you have defined the subdomain then you will see the DNS records which you can copy and share with your IT department so they can add these to your DNS. In the same procedure as the other 2 verification steps.

The default gateway is the SMTP gateway that will dispatch system emails to candidates such as sign up emails, reference requests etc. System emails sent to staff e.g. staff account invitation emails are sent by Full Fabric's gateway.