WildApricot sends email but does not provide mailboxes for incoming email messages. We have been using generic Gmail accounts to give our members a way to correspond with us, e.g. bvpcmembership@gmail.com or beavervalleyprobus@gmail.com. This is becoming difficult to maintain because Google are enforcing 2nd factor authentication which makes it very difficult to share these accounts.

One step to address this problem was the introduction of a help desk (Freshdesk). This tool works like a shared email account where a number of us can see and work with all incoming questions or requests. However, we wanted to avoid publishing an unfamiliar email address (help@bvpc.freshdesk.com) so were looking for a way to leverage our main domain, beavervalleyprobus.com.

ImprovMX

ImprovMX is one of many services that provide email forwarding. They have a free version that is limited to a single domain and a maximum of 25 aliases. That's all we need, so we configured it as follows.

The ImprovMX user account is help@bvpc.freshdesk.com with password available from Martin. The web site address is https://app.improvmx.com/

The following email addresses (aliases) were set up:

DNS

Note that there are 2 SPF definitions combined in a single TXT record. This is necessary to have both WildApricot and ImprovMX work properly.