The Brandle Presence Manager is designed to deliver a single, centralized digital governance solution for our enterprise customers. Not only does Brandle allow you to discover and inventory all of your social media and web points-of-presence, but we allow users to email others from within the system.
It is common that a team member may have a question about a POP and will reach out to a colleague (e.g. the account manager) for an answer. This can be done via the Notes feature. Additionally, when a user is flagging one or more GRC Issues for remediation a Note is sent via email. These emailed Notes and Issues are also kept as a historical record so your team members can always view the history of communication (which is critical for regulated companies).
Brandle uses a transactional email service known as Mandrill (from MailChimp), which is used by many SaaS solutions, to send and receive email messages. In the default configuration, your emails will be sent from a third-party email address "on behalf of" the actual sender. It may look something like this:
From: Jane User <jane.user@mail4.wdc04.mandrillapp.com> On Behalf Of Jane User
The format of how this will appear will depend upon the mail reader used to view the message. This is because the Sender and the From fields in the message header are not the same:
From: Jane User <jane.user@company.com>
Sender: Jane User <jane.user@mail4.wdc04.mandrillapp.com>
This is because Mandrill does not know it has the authority to send email as Jane User <jane.user@company.com>; so it has to declare that it is the actual Sender, not necessarily Jane.
When email is sent with a Sender address that differs from the From address, spam and malware programs may block, flag, or rewrite the messages in ways that are undesired. Therefore, most companies will wish to have email sent by their employees appear as it would normally; to do this you will need to add mandrillapp.com as an authorized sender for your corporate email domain – sometimes known as a "sending domain."
To perform this function you will need to get your corporate IT or domain manager involved to update your corporate records in the Domain Name System (DNS).
How to ensure email comes directly from your employees
You'll need to add or update the SPF and DKIM records for your domain and verify that Mandrill can send email directly as users at your domain (e.g. company.com). Otherwise, all emails will continue to appear as coming from a user at mandrillapp.com "on behalf of" your employees.
Here is the process to add DNS records for the Mandrill service. Included in this article are troubleshooting suggestions with SPF and DKIM validator tools.
Important Note
It is important to note that the Domain Name System has a limit of 10 DNS look-ups in processing your SPF record. As explained by this Demarcly article, this limitation is designed to prevent denial of service attacks (Ref RFC7208):
SPF implementations MUST limit the number of mechanisms and modifiers that do DNS lookups to at most 10 per SPF check, including any lookups caused by the use of the "include" mechanism or the "redirect" modifier. If this number is exceeded during a check, a PermError MUST be returned. The "include", "a", "mx", "ptr", and "exists" mechanisms as well as the "redirect" modifier do count against this limit. The "all", "ip4", and "ip6" mechanisms do not require DNS lookups and therefore do not count against this limit.
Even if "mandrillapp.com" is listed in your SPF record but it requires more than 10 DNS lookups, Mandrill will continue to appear as the actual Sender of the your users' email messages.
Demarcly has a good SPF Record Checker tool which you may find useful if you are concerned about your SPF record.
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