Setting up an email address for gov.uk

It was mentioned on Monday’s PC meeting that the council must set up a .gov.uk email address. Ken Bamford mentioned there are some councils that had already transitioned to this and he would ask them to assist. I would imagine LCC have a pamphlet with guidance on how to do this for parish councils – it will of course be hassle for the clerk to set up.

I have done this in the past, but for a .gov.uk website that was solely managed by the organisation. However, I am sure the process will be straight forward, but unfortunately will cost money if something like Microsoft 365 is used. Doesn’t everything always cost money? Consequently, the precept will have to rise.

Below is an extract from the .gov.uk website.

If you need to email your users, you must do it in a way that is reliable and protects them from spam and phishing.

Use a specialist service provider

You should use a specialist service provider for sending emails, and consider using GOV.UK Notify. Your service provider should:

send and receive email using Transport Layer Security (TLS), where available
use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to sign outbound email
provide a hostname or IP range for you to include in your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record

Create an email address

To email users, you must set up an email address on the service.gov.uk domain, for example:

Talk to your department IT team or service provider to set up an email address on the service.gov.uk domain.

You must only email your users from this email address and not from your department, agency or any other domain.

Allow users to reply to you

You must create an email address that your users can reply to, and you must read their messages.

You can receive user replies by either:

allowing users to reply directly
setting a reply-to address

Protect your users

When contacting your users, you must:

leave out sensitive information, like bank details
avoid making requests for personal information, like a user’s date of birth
show the URL in full, and use URLs that are easy to read
only use shortened URLs if they have been created by the Government Digital Service or your IT department
avoid sending attachments with emails
include the user’s first name and surname in the body of the email to make phishing more difficult
enable Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) to stop someone spoofing your domain
follow the guidance on securing government email to set up DMARC and TLS on your service.gov.uk domains

Read more information about handling links and URLs in emails.

Dealing with delivery errors

Do not keep sending mail to email addresses that you know are broken or do not exist.

Testing your email delivery

You must implement automated testing and monitoring to make sure your email sending is reliable.

The level of reliability you need depends on:

what your service does and how critical email is to the service
the development phase you’re in – in alpha you will not need as much reliability as when the service is live

Types of checks you need

The types of checks you need to achieve your chosen level of reliability depend on how you’re sending emails.

If you’re using GOV.UK Notify or another managed email service provider, it may be enough to carry out a combination of:

monitoring checks on your integration with the external services
automated tests that verify the integration with the third-party application programming interface (API)

If you need to be more confident of reliability, you can set up full end-to-end tests which check both the integration of your service and the eventual delivery to the recipient.