Getting Invites Past a School Filter

Invitations and join emails from BenchOS are sent from hello@benchos.coach. Most inboxes take them without a fuss. School email systems often do not.

If your players say they never got the invite, this page covers what's happening, what to do right now, and what to send your IT department so it stops happening.

What's usually going on

School Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 tenants are configured to be aggressive with mail from senders they don't recognize — especially mail sent to student accounts. A typical setup routes an unfamiliar sender's message to the student's Spam folder, or holds it in an administrator quarantine the student can't see at all.

Two things this is almost never:

• A bad email address. If the address didn't exist, the invite would come back as bounced, and BenchOS shows that on the pending invite.
• A BenchOS outage. The message left our sender and the school's mail server accepted it. What happened next happened inside the school's system.

You can tell these apart on Settings → Staff & Permissions. Each pending invite shows its delivery state:

What it says	What it means
Email sent, not confirmed	Handed to our mail provider; no delivery confirmation yet.
Reached their mail server	The school's server accepted it. It can still be filtered into spam or a quarantine from there.
Email bounced	The address was rejected. Usually a typo or a closed account — check the spelling.
Marked as spam	Someone reported the message. Use a link instead of resending.

"Reached their mail server" plus a player who never saw it is the filtering case this page is about.

Right now: don't wait on email

You don't have to solve the mail problem to get your team into BenchOS. Two ways in, neither of which needs an inbox:

The team join link. On Settings → Staff & Permissions, create a join link and post it in your team group chat, or show the QR code at the end of practice. Each player picks their name off the roster and sets a password. The link lasts 14 days, covers as many players as you have unclaimed roster spots, and you can turn it off any time.

A single invite link. For one person, use Copy link on their pending invite and send it however you actually reach them. Same effect, one player at a time — and this is the way to go for an assistant coach or another admin, since the team join link only adds players.

For players, a personal email address usually works better than a school one. Nothing in BenchOS requires a school address, and the player picks their own when joining through the team link.

The permanent fix: ask IT to allowlist BenchOS

This is worth doing once. It fixes delivery for every player you'll ever add at that school, and it takes your IT admin a few minutes.

Forward them this section.

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For the school IT administrator

A staff member is using BenchOS, a coaching platform, and its invitation emails are being filtered before they reach student accounts. Please allowlist the following sender.

Sender details

Field	Value
From address	hello@benchos.coach
From domain	benchos.coach
Envelope / return-path domain	send.benchos.coach
Mail provider	Resend (Amazon SES infrastructure)

The domain publishes SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and messages are DKIM-signed as benchos.coach. Authentication is not the failure — messages are being accepted and then filtered.

Google Workspace

1. Check Admin console → Apps → Google Workspace → Gmail → Spam, phishing and malware → Quarantine (admin.google.com) for held messages from benchos.coach, and release any you find.
2. Add benchos.coach to the Email allowlist under Gmail → Spam, phishing and malware, or add an Inbound gateway / bypass spam filter rule for that domain scoped to the relevant organizational unit.

Microsoft 365

1. Check Microsoft Defender → Email & collaboration → Review → Quarantine for held messages from benchos.coach.
2. Add benchos.coach to the Allowed senders/domains list under Anti-spam inbound policy, or create a Tenant Allow/Block List entry.

Volume is low — a handful of messages when a coach adds players to a roster, typically at the start of a season.

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If it's still not arriving

Ask one player to check their own Spam folder first — that's the most common answer and it doesn't need IT. If the message is there, having them mark it "Not spam" helps future messages for that account.

Otherwise, use the team join link. It works regardless of what the mail system does, and it's the faster path for a whole roster anyway.