FAQs: Fulfillment Resource Guide

Email Notices Support

How to Allow Patrons to Receive Notices from Alma

Unlike Aleph that uses a print daemon running on local machines at each institution, Alma is set up to send notices to patrons from their servers/domain. Notices to patrons are configured to have a From: email address that has the same domain as the institution. The difference between the sending domain and the From: address in the notice can cause legitimate library notifications to be marked as suspicious and either labelled as spam or blocked entirely. There are two ways to configure Alma and an institution's network so that notices to patrons are routed correctly to their inbox.

Use the Institution's SMTP Server

To configure the Alma Platform to pass the email to an external SMTP server, please refer to "Configure the Mail Handling Integration Profile’ in the following documentation. (FLVC will configure this.) Depending on the firewall policy of the institution, IT staff may need to open access from the Ex Libris cloud to the SMTP server for the relevant port. The outgoing IP range for Alma, Primo VE and Primo Classic can be found here.

IT staff will need to provide FALSC with the following information:

1. Institution's domain name
2. Institution's SMTP mail relaying hostname
3. Username/Password
4. Whether encryption is used - (encryption port 857)

Use "Sender Policy Framework" (SPF)

SPF is a method of allowing the Ex Libris cloud to send emails on behalf of the institution. When an email is received by a SMTP server, a security check is performed where the IP that had sent the email is compared to the IPs listed in the DNS record for the ‘From Address’ domain. To configure SPF, the DNS administrator of the institution needs to add the Ex Libris mail relay IPs to the institution’s domain in a TXT record. The Ex Libris mail relay IPs differ based on the region of the customer so the relevant ‘SPF Include Entry’ should be chosen. The different ‘SPF Include Entries’ for the different regions can be found here.

This method is fully configured by Institutional IT staff.