Configuring ContactMonkey’s Trusted URLs In Group Policy

August 17, 2023 13:21

If your images are not displaying automatically for your recipients, your IT team may need to add ContactMonkey-specific URLs to your Group Policy to ensure that ContactMonkey is not flagged as an external tool and therefore blocked.

If these URLs are not added, it can result in some aspects of ContactMonkey being blocked and not performing as expected. This can look like:

Emails sent through ContactMonkey appearing as external emails in any capacity
- Images not loading automatically
- [ EXTERNAL ] tag on emails

Applies To:

❌ Gmail

✅ O365

✅ OWA

✅ COM Add-In

Getting Started

To complete these steps, you will need to have:

An IT team member with permission to update Group Policy

What is Group Policy?

Group Policy is a hierarchical infrastructure that allows a network administrator in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory to implement specific configurations for users and computers. Group Policy is primarily a security tool, and can be used to apply security settings to users and computers.

Configuring ContactMonkey’s Trusted URLs In Group Policy

In the event that your security policy actively disables parts of our website, you may need to bypass our trusted URLs in your group policy. To do so, follow these steps:

1. On your device running Windows Server, open Command Prompt and type `gpedit.msc` to open the Group Policy Management Editor
2. In your existing trusted site GPO, navigate to:
  
  User Configuration >
  Administrative Templates >
  Windows Components >
  Internet Explorer >
  Internet Control Panel >
  Security Page and click Site to Zone Assignment List
3. Click Enabled, then Show
4. Enter each of the following URLs as names with a value of 2 (Trusted Sites)
  1. https://contactmonkey.com/api/v1/tracker
  2. https://contactmonkey.com/api/v1/read
  3. https://contactmonkey.com/api/v1/reads_val
  4. http://daer.contactmonkey.org (redirects to the below URL)
    1. https://7ohu5yf40b.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/prod
    2. https://cm-email-assets.s3.amazonaws.com

1. Click OK
2. Click Apply
3. Click OK
4. Give your system time to refresh and apply this new policy.

Related articles:

Bypassing ContactMonkey IPs In Microsoft 365 Defender

Email At Scale: Explained

Sending Limits with ContactMonkey