Background

Journyx's hosted environment has the ability to send out emails through our mail server, aspmail.journyx.com.  This also has the ability to 'spoof' any email address as the From address.  Spammers can use the same technique to send you emails that appear to come from ebay, but didn't actually originate there.  Email spoofing is a big problem that email servers don't really have a way to prevent.  A properly configured email client, or a program, can send mail as any address.

Identifying the issue

 For 12.0 or later go to Settings -> System settings -> Server and email. For Journyx version 11.5.4 or earlier go under Configuration -> System Settings -> Server and Email. Below is an example screenshot of that page.  Notice the highlighted information.  SMTP (outgoing) email server is our mail server, aspmail.journyx.com.  'From' address for email sent by the system is timekeeping@example.com.  This means it's spoofing the from address.  If SMTP (outgoing) email server was a mail server at example.com, that would not be spoofing.

What can I do?

Both of these options will likely require your IT team in some capacity.  Journyx Support cannot make these changes for you, nor will they know what the correct values are or how to change them on your domain.

Option 1: Configure Journyx to send through your email server

The most sure-fire way to make sure your mail gets to the recipient is to configure Journyx to send using your own mail server.  This is similar to configuring Outlook or another mail client and can be done using the fields on the Server and Email page.  Some IT teams will not allow this to happen, but it's worth it to ask as other options could still fail depending on the configuration of the email server that is receiving the mail.

Option 2: Set Journyx to be able to send mail as your domain

In the past years there have been a couple standards that have arisen that try to combat this problem.  The most common is Sender Policy Framework, or SPF.  This defines a way for the owner of a domain name ( ebay.com ) to say which mail servers should be authorized to send mail 'from' that domain.  Below is an example of an SPF record.  This does not allow aspmail.journyx.com to send mail as this domain.

In order to authorize Journyx's mail server you just need to add the following to your SPF record:

a:admin.journyx.com

This says "Find the records for aspmail.journyx.com and say they're OK."  This method does not have a 100% success rate, but it will help significantly.

FAQ:

Q: Can I just whitelist your IP address?

A: Since May 2017 Journyx cloud is now hosted on Amazon Web Services.  Our mail server is as well.  This means our mail server could be assigned any IP address assigned to AWS which is a huge amount.  Whitelisting all of these IP addresses is possible, but opens you up to any spammer that uses AWS to send spam since they will be using the same addresses.