Custom Email Branding in NodePing

2023/07/25 by Leave a comment

NodePing is pretty popular with hosting service providers and marketing companies that want to keep an eye on their customer’s websites and other Internet-facing services. One of the features they often use is to send NodePing email alerts from one of their own branded email addresses. Uptime alerts with your own ‘from’ email, like ‘support@examplecompany.com’, is a great way to keep brand recognition and increase cohesion with your customers and allows those customers to respond to alerts directly to your support system, not NodePing.

Setting a custom ‘from’ email address for NodePing email notifications is easy. You only need to:

  • Change the ‘from’ email in your branding settings
  • Update your SPF record to include NodePing’s SMTP servers

Email Templates

To change the ‘from’ email address for notifications, login to your NodePing account and navigate to Account Settings -> Branding. In the Notifications section, you’ll see there are 4 different email templates:

  • First
  • Up
  • Down
  • Diagnostic

You’ll need to modify the ‘From’ email address in each of those and click on the corresponding “Save…” button for each of the 4 email templates. It may take up to 10 minutes for those settings to take effect.

SPF Record

Your SPF record is a DNS record that tells email services where email from your domain is allowed to be sent from. If you try to send email from a server that isn’t in your SPF, there’s a good chance that email is going to get rejected or marked as spam. It’s basically a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to send email with your domain in the ‘from’ field.

If you don’t modify your SPF record, there’s an increased chance notification emails will bounce or be marked as spam. Let’s add the NodePing SMTP servers to your domain’s SPF record to increase deliverability. Modifying that special TXT DNS record usually happens at your domain registrar or DNS provider. You’ll need to login there and edit the existing SPF record. If one doesn’t exist, you’ll want to create one.

If you have an existing SPF record, you can add the following to it:

include:spf.nodeping.com

Sometimes an example is the best way to see how this modification is done. Below is an SPF record before adding the NodePing entry.

"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net ~all"

And now that same SPF record with the NodePing entry added to it.

"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net include:spf.nodeping.com ~all"

It doesn’t matter which order you put the NodePing entry in, so long as it’s after the ‘v=spf1’ part and before the ‘all’ part. Those need to bookend a valid SPF record.

Once that record is saved and propagated through DNS, your contacts should be able to receive NodePing alerts with your very own ‘from’ email address on them.

Customizing your NodePing email notifications is a great way to increase brand recognition and cohesion with your customers. With NodePing, you’ll be the first to know when services are offline. Quick detection means quick resolution and more uptime.

If you don’t yet have a NodePing account, please consider signing up for our free, 15-day trial. See for yourself why those who know, use fast, reliable, and affordable NodePing.

Filed under Email, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,

Threaded Notification Emails

2018/07/03 by Leave a comment

We have a new feature to make it easier to keep track of email notifications. Previously, each email notification started a new email thread or conversation, even if it was just reported that a formerly reported down check was now up. Now, our Business and Provider plans have the option of grouping these emails together through Branding. If you got a “Host Down” email, for example, you can set the “Host Up” message to be sent as a reply to the original email. This feature was made with the goal of keeping track of email notifications easier.

On the back end, we’ve added message references to our emails so your email client knows that the “Up” message is related to the “Down” message.

However, not all email systems will identify that messages are related to each other just based on the “reply-to” and “references” ID’s.  For gmail and some other email services, in order to enable this feature,  you’ll need to adjust your NodePing settings to make your up and down email subject lines identical.  To do this, first login to your NodePing account. Then go to the Account settings tab, then the Branding tab under it.  All you need to do to receive your up and down emails on the same thread is set their subject lines to match. Scroll down to Up Notifications: Email “Message Subject:”and set it to match Down Notification: Email’s “Message Subject:”, or vice versa. Or, you could set their subject line to be something else entirely; the important thing is that they are identical.

By the way, the notification branding lets you do a lot more besides just make the subject lines match for message threading.  You can customize what your notifications say and what information is included.  There’s more information about this powerful feature in our documentation.

We hope you find this feature helpful. If you haven’t tried NodePing yet, you can get a free fifteen-day trial here. If you have questions or comments, email us at support@nodeping.com.

Filed under Notifications, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,