If your organization plans to send mass email notifications to an internally focused audience (eg. hundreds or thousands of recipients who are on your internal email system) using PIER, PIER Systems, Inc. strongly recommends that your organization work with PIER to plan for incremental email testing. This testing should occur before you attempt to use the system to send notifications during an actual emergency.

Read more about maximizing speed of email delivery

Email distributions from PIER are sometimes caught by SPAM filters because PIER's email servers are not trusted to send mail on your domain's behalf. Because email from PIER originates on servers not within your domain you must identify PIER's servers as authorized to deliver mail for your domain. This is accomplished via SPF.

For more information on SPF please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

Additional whitelisting may be done by looking for email headers unique to PIER. 

X-Mailer: PIER System - PIER Systems, Inc. - www.piersystems.com
Return-Path: bounces+XXXX@piersystem.com

View a detailed example of header information for email messages coming from PIER

When you send email to a dispersed audience on multiple networks and email systems (media outlets, community members, personal email addresses) you will have little control over whether the message is identified as SPAM by system filters or settings on a individual recipient's email inbox. If you plan to use PIER to send email distributions to an internal audience (your employees) who are all on your your email system, you can take steps to whitelist messages that originate from PIER.

In order to ensure that messages from PIER are allowed to enter your internal email system, your email administrator should use the following information to whitelist messages from PIER:

• Header information:
  X-Mailer: PIER System - PIER Systems, Inc. - www.piersystems.com
  Return-Path: bounces+XXXX@piersystem.com
  
• PIER mail server IP addresses are:
  204.232.162.224/28 (204.232.162.225 - 204.232.162.238)
  216.57.200.32/27 (216.57.200.33 - 216.57.200.62)

Another issue related to receiving email distributions from PIER is that many email systems are set to deny a volume of messages coming from a single source in a short period of time.

In addition to explicitly whitelisting messages from PIER, you will want to work with your email administrators to adjust these "trip limits" so that a large number of messages coming from PIER in a short period of time are allowed to enter your email system.

Related Topics

Determining Your Capacity to Receive Email and Phone Messages from PIER
Notification is Not Communication: Why Building and Maintaining Trust Requires Far More Than Mere Notification