Advice to Outside Mailers

The House often receives exception requests for preferential treatment of email sent from external organizations or individuals. These include "allow listing", "safe listing", "whitelisting", etc.

The House also receives requests about actions the House email systems perform on mail sent to the House. This includes mail rejection, junking, delivery, and related actions. Due to the stringent information security requirements of the House the following requests will be considered:

  • U.S. government organizations in the Legislative, Executive or Judicial branches
  • House vendors, only to facilitate services currently under contract, may submit a request to their Contracting Officer's Representative.

Other organizations must pass requests through a Member or Leadership Office, Committee, or Support Office who may sponsor the request to the House’s IT organization. The planned email content must be related to the operations of the sponsoring Office or Committee.

Normally, exception requests are denied, as the House employs recipient-level controls and does not provide preferential treatment to organizations or individuals. Due to the volume of requests, individual replies may not be provided. However, the House will consider exception requests for sending domains that are protected with Sender Policy Framework (SPF) fail mechanism - as described at http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax.

Exception requests should include:

  • Name, organization, and phone number of requestor.
  • The client organization and contact name.
  • Time period, sender address, and recipient address of previously sent messages.
  • Explanation of perceived problems encountered.
  • Requested House action.
  • Justification for exception.

Senders experiencing problems are encouraged to review their sending IP reputation, firewall configuration, and email authentication configuration before contacting the House. The House will not assist in troubleshooting such sender issues. Senders should follow internet email best practices. The M3AAWG organization publishes sender best practices; a document is available at https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/document/M3AAWG_Senders_BCP_Ver3-2015-02.pdf. Best practices are also published by several major internet service providers and mailbox providers.

Advocacy organizations are encouraged to review the Communicating With Congress (CWC) program description at http://www.house.gov/content/vendors/cwc/ for an alternate means of sending emails to the House.

Inquiries regarding the above can be directed to http://www.house.gov/contact/.