By default, each Post Affiliate Pro account/license uses PHP mail() function to send emails. The maximum number of emails that can be sent using this function is 20 per hour. If you try to send out more emails than the limit allows, these emails are automatically put in a queue and sent in the next hour.
Your affiliates can receive many kinds of email notifications from the system(for example about each new commission) and with the growing number of your affiliates, you can get to the point when there are more emails being put in the email queue than emails sent out during one hour. In case that 20 emails per hour limit is not enough for you, you should consider setting up email sending to be handled by your own mail server through the SMTP option described below. The limit with own SMTP is 1000 emails per hour.
Due to our server's higher spam ratings, the emails sent out using the PHP mail() function might not be delivered to the recipients in some cases or marked as SPAM. There are two options for how you can increase the chances of the emails being delivered, using your own mail server through the SMTP option is also the best solution for this case.
1. Use PHP mail() function with your own domain and set up SPF record (hosted)
As soon as you change the Email field under Mail Account setting to use another domain then @postaffiliatepro.com it will ask you to set up an SPF record. It is needed as a confirmation for recipients' mail servers that our mail servers are allowed to send out emails under your domain. It helps decrease spam ratings of such emails and increase delivery chances.
You need to set up an SPF record in your domain's DNS settings, specifically under the TXT record. How you add the SPF record differs based on whether you already have some v=spf1 record set or not. If you don't have any other SPF record there then you can add just this record into TXT:
v=spf1 redirect=_spf.postaffiliatepro.com
If you already have some SPF record there so for example, your current SPF looks like this:
v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.websupport.sk ?all
then you need to append to this record also Post Affiliate Pro line with INCLUDE instead of REDIRECT so it would look like this:
v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.websupport.sk include:_spf.postaffiliatepro.com ?all
You can check whether the SPF record is propagated already with many different DNS checker tools, our favorite is https://www.whatsmydns.net/#TXT/ where you enter your domain name, hit search, and see whether in the records over different geographical locations you see the correct SPF record including postaffiliatepro.com
2. Set up SMTP connection to send out emails
If some of your affiliates are complaining that they are not receiving their email notifications from your affiliate program and you can see those notifications marked as Sent in your Post Affiliate Pro mail outbox it's most likely caused by the fact that you are using PHP mail() function to send those emails and recipient's mail server is blocking those emails. In this case, we suggest you use the other available method of sending emails and that is via SMTP connection to your own mail server.
SMTP server connection details should be provided to you by your mail server provider.
For example, if you want to use your Gmail account to send emails from your Post Affiliate Pro software you can connect to a Gmail SMTP server like this.
The "Email" field of the configuration screen will need to contain an email address which is an allowed sender on your mail server/service, so normally your actual email address.
Advanced settings tab
On the Advanced settings tab, you can change User-Agent that will be used in outgoing emails and you can also set the time period for automatic deletion of old email records here.
There is also a checkbox for Use system email as sender in Contact Us forms. If it's checked, the system email address will be used as a sender for emails created via the contact us function available for your affiliates or visitors of the mini-site and the affiliate's or customer's email address will be added to field 'Reply to' instead. This is needed if your mail server doesn't allow to set any email address as "from" email.