Let's start with understanding one of the many reasons emails can be marked as spam by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).  An ISP is the company you use for your email - for instance, Gmail, AOL and Comcast are popular ISPs.


When an email is received by your ISP, before it is put into your Inbox, your ISP checks to see if that email is likely spam or not.  If the website www.example.com sends an email using example@gmail.com as the from address, that email will most likely end up marked as spam.  This is because an email sent from the server at example.com is expected to have an email address that ends in example.com.  When the ISP recognizes the web server and email address have different domains (a domain is the part in an email address after the @), it will consider that incoming email as spam. There are exceptions to this, but the sending domain needs to set up special conditions for those exceptions.


In the case of GroupValet, we send all sorts of emails to our users.  And in order to help make it clear who the email is from, we send the email from the Group Captain or Activity Owner.  So as an example, if Joe Smith (jsmith@gmail.com) is the Group Captain, his group members will receive an email from the GroupValet servers as Joe Smith.  When the receiving ISP receives an email from jsmith@gmail.com that was sent from the servers at groupvalet.com, they will see the different domains and mark that email as spam.


To alleviate this issue, we assign every user a unique email address in the format of user-nnn@members.groupvalet.com, where nnn is a unique number of varying length.  If Joe Smith's unique GroupValet email is user-12345678@members.groupvalet.com, we'll use that email with Joe Smith's name attached to it when sending emails.  This way, the receiving ISP will see that both the email and sending server use the groupvalet.com domain and the email will be less likely to be considered spam.


The email user-nnn@members.groupvalet.com is called an alias - a forwarding email address.  If you send an email to user-nnn@members.groupvalet.com, from jane_thomas@aol.com, the server at GroupValet performs the following steps:

1. Receives the email

2. Looks in the database to find the real email address for that recipient (ie, not the members.groupvalet.com address)

3. Looks in the database to find the members.groupvalet.com for that sender (ie, the members.groupvalet.com address for jane_thomas@aol.com)

4. Forwards the email on to the real email of the intended recipient, but using the members.groupvalet.com address of the sender as the "from" address


This process allows us to send the email to the proper recipient without being marked as spam.  By the way, many large sites that have member-generated content follow this same process, such as LinkedIn.


Many email clients (the program you use to send and check email) have address books where emails that are received by the user are automatically added to their address book.  So here’s the scenario - a Group Captain sends a signup notice to Paul Jones, who is a member of their group.  Paul opens the email and the Group Captain’s members.groupvalet.com email is automatically added to Paul’s address book under the Group Captain’s name.

Later, if Paul wants to send an email to the Group Captain, he will open a new email and type the Captain’s name into the “To” field.  If he is not paying close attention, he likely won’t notice if he's using the version from the address book with the members.groupvalet.com address.  It’s fine - the email will still get to the Group Captain. But if the Captain replies, we now have a loop where both people are using the members.groupvalet.com addresses.  Everything will work fine, but they will see those addresses in their emails.


Ultimately this is nothing to be concerned about.  Emails will be properly sent and delivered.  Though we can understand why it might be disconcerting to see a strange looking email address like that pop up in your emails.