Anyone using LX Starter yet? I’m interested in whether the emails are coming from your own domain or not and if they are if you have any technical/security info around that setup that I could have our IT team review. We are still on 5.4 so can’t get on the list until we upgrade, but just trying to get details about the configuration.
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Hi Julie,
We started testing these out in the fall but we’re not live yet. The hold up is (1) they don’t yet offer the additional courtesy notice, which we use; we don’t want to have an inconsistent notice setup so told them we’d hold off until that was available; and (2) we’re still working on the e-mail piece.
In the LX Starter setup, you enter the email address that the notices should be coming from (in our case circulation@fauquiercounty.gov). I had brought up concerns about our notices going to spam because of Vega not being a designated sender of email from our domain, and that seemed to surprise them. Anyway, they ended up giving us details to put in our SPF and DKIM. I gave that to our IT person who has it set up but is concerned he’s done something wrong (it’s unclear if he or III is getting an error), and he is supposed to be working with our III contact, but they are so busy onboarding new libraries, he’s kind of getting ignored at this point. So starting to wonder if we’ll ever launch this…
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Thanks for sharing your experience @pruntela
A useful tool to help check any email set up is: https://www.mail-tester.com/
Using the tool, you get a random email address. You send an email to that address from the platform you’re trying to check and then the tool will score various aspects of your email platform, including the DNS set up.
It also gives you a unique URL address for the “report” it generates so you can share that with others and they can see exactly what is going on.
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“I had brought up concerns about our notices going to spam because of Vega not being a designated sender of email from our domain, and that seemed to surprise them”
Thanks Alison, that is concerning! Keep us posted on your progress. It’s not great that iii have gone heavy on the marketing with this and they aren’t able to respond to basic questions about it from your IT dept.
Wes, maybe this is my Friday afternoon brain, and while this may be a useful tool in general I don’t understand how you could use this toolset in this scenario.
So if our IT manages langara.ca and let’s say company x wants to be able to send emails as test@langara.ca from program LXStarter, how can the IT test this using the tool? In fact how can anyone test this using the tool because it will need to come from the program itself not a separate website.
Yes, you do need some facility to produce a test email using the service. I would hope that most services would offer some variation of that facility even if it must be performed in a manual way. In Polaris for example, you can send an email list through the PAC to help test the “wiring” of the email service.
If there are questions or issues with deliverability asking support to show you how to generate a test message or having them generate one for you should be a reasonable request as part of the set up or troubleshooting process.
If there is absolutely zero ability to generate any test message, I’d question how serious they are about email. Has anyone ever gotten anything with modern email setup 100% right from the start? Especially when some parts of the setup, like DNS entries, are typically outside of your control.
If you find that it is impossible to generate a test email either through support or the software itself, please direct message me with an issue ticket number and I’ll follow-up with our contacts at Innovative through IUG to pursue it further.
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Just to follow up on @jcole question, is anyone actually live with the LX Starter notices? I hesitate to ask on the Vega listserv, which seems to be geared at just sending out enhancements, etc., vs. more vigorous discussion on things working/not working.
Some additional basic LX Starter FAQs:
Hi Alison-
We have a management team meeting next Friday and will go live shortly thereafter. We’ll keep you posted.
As for authentication, they’re using Amazon Simple Email Service so our test emails have come across like this: accountinfo@bburglibrary.net via amazonses.com.
In the webinar they emphasized that bounced emails will immediately be switched to a secondary notification method so that there wasn’t any trouble with the email getting tagged as spam.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we go live!
With that said, while they’re still kinks to work through I’m grateful to have a web-based (easily editable) method for notices.
Happy Friday, All!
Amie
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Thanks for the info Amie and good luck with your implementation!
Are your live emails going to come across the same way?
Thanks so much for sharing your real-world experience @ammthoma !
In theory they could adjust this by having customers follow the DKIM setup: domain name system - Remove "via" from emails sent to Gmail from Amazon SES - Server Fault
But that involves a lot of variables and has the potential to break “regular” email which is a risk they may be trying to avoid. Let us know how the launch goes. It will feel great to start sending emails that don’t look like faxes from the 1990s!
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“It will feel great to start sending emails that don’t look like faxes from the 1990s!” 
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I’m not sure, Julie - but I’ll keep you guys posted! 