Emails

Aligni sends a variety of emails during normal operations. These emails include notifications and reports sent to account holders as well as quote requests and purchase orders to vendor contacts.

Notifications and Reports

Aligni regularly sends out a variety of notifications and reports to account holders. If these emails are mis-categorized by your email client, please be sure to correct the situation and tag them as not SPAM to preserve our email reputation (see below). Similarly, please DO NOT tag any emails coming from Aligni as SPAM as this can damage our global email reputation for other users.

Emails to Vendor Contacts

As a security measure, Aligni is not allowed to send emails that appear to be from your private email address. Specifically, these emails cannot be constructed with the “FROM” parameter set to your email address. Instead, these emails are sent from our notifications account but with an address name that indicates they are from you. Additionally, we set the “REPLY-TO” parameter to your email address. Well behaved email clients will properly route email replies back to this “REPLY-TO” address.

For example, the following is an example excerpt of an email header we may construct:

Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2016 17:24:37 +0000
From: Veronica Bluth via Aligni Notifications <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Consolidated Diversified RFQ (2016-11-05)

For Those More Technical…

We try to follow best practices and be good internet citizens. RFC 2822 offers some guidelines on email behaviors. In particular, section 3.6.2 says: “When the “Reply-To:” field is present, it indicates the mailbox(es) to which the author of the message suggests that replies be sent. … In all cases, the “From:” field SHOULD NOT contain any mailbox that does not belong to the author(s) of the message.” This is why we use our own email address in the “FROM” field and offer yours in the “REPLY-TO” field.

Managing Email Reputations

The Internet email system is very complicated and includes a number of measures to help manage SPAM and other unsolicited email. Aligni uses a transactional email system that is part of Amazon AWS called Amazon SES. Amazon provides the email services and Aligni channels all outgoing emails through that service. To help manage SPAM, Amazon needs to make sure that the reputation of its email servers remain high. This places a burden on us to make sure that we manage bounced emails and rejected emails properly as mismanagement can damage our email server reputation.

Since RFQs and POs generated by Aligni are technically unsolicited (i.e. they are sent to people who are not necessarily Aligni account holders), please make sure you are responsible with your use of these services. If we determine that any abuse is being done, we may disable the offending account or sites without notice.

Email Authentication

In addition to committing to send high quality emails, Aligni also makes use of DKIM and SPF settings as part of the Internet’s DNS system. These two settings help authenticate outgoing Aligni emails so that recipient servers can be confident that the emails originated from our system and were not spoofed for nefarious purposes.