Let's start with the basics - Your domain name is a big part of your association's brand identity. It's how your members find your website. When you type your domain into your web browser, the browser looks up the IP address for that name and can start communicating with the computer where that site lives. For example, our domain name is noviams.com - yours might end  with .org, .net, ... etc.

> Learn more about DNS and Your Domains here

This domain name is also often used, on a high level, to create your email addresses. It gives you the ability to have your yourname@associationname.org or infoyourname@associationname.org email.

Sometimes though, emails aren't set up using the branded domain. Instead some associations may use a Gmail, Hotmail, etc. email address as their primary email address.

Novi uses this primary email address to send out registration confirmations, new member welcome emails, event confirmations & reminders, as well as all of our other transactional emails coming from the site. 

{ TLDR; There's a high risk that emails coming from your website will not be deliverable. Not good! }

For these transactional emails, Novi uses a dedicated email server to send these out, in order to ensure as high deliverability rates as possible. This works great when we have permission to send on behalf of a specific domain (the part after the @ in an email). As you can imagine, gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc. are not specific domains that we can receive permission to send from.

If Novi sends an email from your gmail.com address to another address, that email could be automatically blocked by 1) Gmail itself or 2) the recipient of the email, due to their server's spam prevention rules. 

These rules are not something we can avoid at Novi, we simply are not allowed to send from a gmail.com address using our email system.

Great question! This depends on who your existing domain registrar is (the site where your domain name was set up, such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions), as most of them offer a simple email service. This is typically pretty simple to set up for a very reasonable monthly fee.

There are also more full featured email services out there like the one we use, Office 365, which can also be setup with a little bit more work. 

Your IT professional or your domain registrar's support should be able to walk you through the process either way. This way, this will help with your transactional email deliverability from the site and you'll also have the added bonus of adding an extra layer of polish to your email communications.