Unlike Aleph that uses a print daemon running on local machines at each institution, Alma is set up to send notices to patrons from their servers/domain. Notices to patrons are configured to have a From: email address that has the same domain as the institution. The difference between the sending domain and the From: address in the notice can cause legitimate library notifications to be marked as suspicious and either labelled as spam or blocked entirely. There are two ways to configure Alma and an institution's network so that notices to patrons are routed correctly to their inbox.
Additional information:
How to prevent emails from Ex Libris products being marked as suspicious
To configure the Alma Platform to pass the email to an external SMTP server, please refer to "Configure the Mail Handling Integration Profile’ in the following documentation. (FLVC will configure this.) Depending on the firewall policy of the institution, IT staff may need to open access from the Ex Libris cloud to the SMTP server for the relevant port. The outgoing IP range for Alma, Primo VE and Primo Classic can be found here.
IT staff will need to provide FLVC with the following information:
SPF is a method of allowing the Ex Libris cloud to send emails on behalf of the institution. When an email is received by a SMTP server, a security check is performed where the IP that had sent the email is compared to the IPs listed in the DNS record for the ‘From Address’ domain. To configure SPF, the DNS administrator of the institution needs to add the Ex Libris mail relay IPs to the institution’s domain in a TXT record. The Ex Libris mail relay IPs differ based on the region of the customer so the relevant ‘SPF Include Entry’ should be chosen. The different ‘SPF Include Entries’ for the different regions can be found here.
This method is fully configured by Institutional IT staff. This method will work properly on its own if the From Address in the email is not customized to have a return address with the institutional domain.
If you would like to have a customized return address in your emails while still having ExLibris send your emails through their servers, you can take advantage of the new feature that ExLibris put out in February. This method requires set up of SPF, like above but has additional step
You will need to supply FLVC with an email address where you would like to receive bounced emails and all outgoing email templates will need to have From email addresses updated to an email address with your domain rather than the default email address supplied in Alma.
Your IT will need to add public keys to your domain's DNS record. The public keys will look like this (bolded portion should be your institution's domain):
selector-1-exlibris._domainkey.abc.edu CNAME selector-1-abc-edu._domainkey.dkim.exlibrisgroup.com
selector-2-exlibris._domainkey.abc.edu CNAME selector-2-abc-edu._domainkey.dkim.exlibrisgroup.com
Please contact help@flvc.org if you would like to set this up.