Complete Spam Filter Preparations

When your school takes part in the MISO Survey, large numbers of campus community members receive e-mails inviting them to participate in the survey. Your e-mail system’s spam filters sometimes prevent the invitation and reminder e-mails from arriving; this interference greatly lowers your response rates.

To ensure strong response at your institution, please work with your system administrators so that your spam filter permits mail from the MISO Survey e-mail servers and its rate check feature is disabled for e-mails coming from the servers. 

The MISO Survey Team will confer with you and your system administrator in the fall, well in advance of Survey launch, to make certain key configurations (described below) and test your spam preparations. We'll conduct this test by sending a few test messages. These help ensure that the hundreds of messages sent when we go live do not get caught in any spam filtering you might employ. 

Please contact us if your email administrators need more information than what we've provided below.

Necessary configuration

Anti-spam 

Here are the specific settings you should use.

• The outgoing email servers use qemailserver.com as the domain.

• The email address of the sender is noreply@qemailserver.com.

• The outgoing mail is mail2.qualtrics.com but you should whitelist for any name in the domain.

• The IP ranges listed below will need to be added to your institution's network allowlist:

  • 162.247.216.0/22

  • 98.97.250.0/24

  • 98.97.249.0/24

  • 98.97.252.9/24 

  • 98.97.253.0/24. 

• The headers of the test messages should contain everything else you might need to prepare your spam filtering tools.

• If your spam filtering software employs rate limits or anti-spoofing features, please remove them for these messages.

• Please remove any “External Email” header from incoming Qualtrics messages.

Email

Your server administrators will need to set up an SPF Record for the Qualtrics servers in order for the messages to look like they are coming from someone on your campus. This will permit the Qualtrics servers to send to your recipients while mimicking an email address from your campus. Please include Qualtrics IP addresses to your SPF record by adding (including quotes) “include:_spf.qemailserver.com”. Information about this step is available on the Qualtrics website.

Qualtrics  

Qualtrics, the survey service MISO uses for survey distribution, has recently changed its process for domain setup. Please have your email administrator follow steps 11 and 12 on this Qualtrics Support page. You will receive your institution-specific details from the MISO Survey team.  Please note that if you have a DKIM record for your own institution’s instance of Qualtrics, you still need an additional DKIM line for the MISO Survey instance of Qualtrics.

Important additional information

Microsoft Exchange

We have experienced serious message delivery problems at schools using Microsoft Exchange as their email system. If you use Microsoft Exchange, it is important to set up a mail flow rule so that messages from the MISO Survey project do not end up in the Clutter folder.

Barracuda

In the past we have experienced serious message delivery problems at schools using Barracuda. If you use Barracuda as a spam filtering device it is important to significantly increase the number of connections per minute permitted.