The email address in your Altru web payment settings looks like a minor field. It decides where confirmation and acknowledgment emails appear to come from, and often where staff notifications land. When it’s wrong, nothing breaks loudly. Purchases still go through and revenue still posts. The emails just quietly stop arriving, or land in spam, and you find out weeks later when a guest calls asking where their receipt is.
As far as we know, Altru doesn’t send a confirmation link to prove you own an address before saving it in these settings, and it won’t warn you about a typo or a domain that blocks outside senders. If you’re not sure how your version behaves, ask Blackbaud support directly. Either way, the checking is on you. Here’s how we’d do it.
Know which addresses you’re actually checking
Web payment and web form setups usually involve more than one address, and they fail in different ways:
- The “from” or sender address on emails guests receive (order confirmations, donation acknowledgments, membership receipts).
- The reply-to address, if your setup has one. This is where a guest’s “Reply” goes.
- Internal notification addresses that tell staff a web transaction happened.
Open your web payment settings and each live web form, and write down every address you find. It’s common to discover that a form built three years ago still points at a former employee’s inbox or an old shared mailbox nobody checks.
Step 1: Confirm each address is real and watched
Send a plain email from your own account to every address on the list. Then confirm a person or a routed shared inbox actually receives it. A bounce means the address is dead. Silence means it exists but nobody’s looking.
For guest-facing addresses, use a shared mailbox (something like tickets@ or membership@) rather than a person’s name. Staff turnover then doesn’t break your receipts.
Step 2: Run a real test transaction
Checking the address alone doesn’t tell you whether the emails Altru sends from it get delivered. The only reliable proof is an end-to-end test:
- Make a small real purchase or donation on each live form, using a personal Gmail address and a personal Outlook or Yahoo address as the buyer.
- Check the inbox, the spam folder, and (in Gmail) the Promotions tab.
- Look at the sender name and address the guest sees. Is it recognizably your organization?
- Hit Reply and confirm the reply lands somewhere staff will see it.
- Confirm any internal notification arrived.
- Void or refund the test transaction in Altru and note it so finance doesn’t chase it.
If your organization has a sandbox or test environment, do a first pass there, but repeat the test in production. Email behavior can differ between environments.
Step 3: Check that your domain allows Blackbaud to send for you
This is the step most people miss, and it’s the most common reason confirmation emails go to spam even when the address is spelled correctly.
When Altru sends a confirmation “from” yourname@yourmuseum.org, the message actually leaves Blackbaud’s mail servers, not yours. Gmail, Outlook and other providers check whether your domain has authorized that. If your domain publishes a strict DMARC policy and Blackbaud isn’t covered by your SPF or DKIM records, receiving servers may reject or junk the message.
What to do:
- Ask your IT person or email provider what DMARC policy your domain uses. A policy of quarantine or reject makes this urgent.
- Ask Blackbaud support what records or settings they recommend so Altru email passes authentication for your domain. Don’t guess at the values; get them from Blackbaud.
- After any DNS change, repeat the test transaction. In Gmail, “Show original” on the received message will report whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed.
Step 4: Re-check whenever something changes
An address that worked at launch can stop working later. Put a quick re-test on the calendar after any of these:
- A staff departure, if any address is tied to that person.
- A switch in email provider (for example, moving to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace).
- Any DNS or domain change, including a rebrand or new domain.
- Building a new web form or copying an old one, since copied forms bring old settings along.
- Before a big sales moment, such as member presale or a holiday event launch.
A twice-a-year test purchase on each live form takes about half an hour and catches most problems before guests do.
What about verifying the guest’s email?
The other side of this is the address the buyer types in. A typo there means the confirmation goes nowhere and a bad email lands on the constituent record. Whether a given Altru web form can ask buyers to enter their email twice or validate it is something to confirm in your own setup. If it can’t, a periodic query of recent web constituents with obviously malformed addresses (missing a dot after the @, common misspellings like “gmial”) helps you clean them up and follow up by phone when it matters.
Quick answers
Will changing the address affect transactions already processed?
No. It only affects emails sent after the change. Guests who already missed a receipt need a manual resend.
Can I use a no-reply address?
You can, but guests reply to receipts with real questions about dates, refunds and accessibility. A monitored address saves you phone calls.
