E-Mail Information

Information regarding E-Mail addressed to the Township

South Brunswick Township uses “state of the practice” e-mail defense mechanisms that are also used by a growing number of public and private agencies around the world.  It is imperative that the Township communicates only with legitimate organizations and people, and protects itself (and its residents, vendors and the public at large) from mischievous or malicious messages. The Township automatically inspects and validates the authenticity of thousands of e-mails arriving each day, and blocks messages that are clearly spam or phishing attempts, suspected of (or found to be) containing fraudulent or dangerous file attachments and links to malicious or inappropriate websites, and spoofing/masquerading the source/sender of the message.

These defense mechanisms usually do not interfere with e-mail addressed to the Township and sent from general email systems such as Google (user@gmail.com), Yahoo (user@yahoo.com), and others (e.g., msn.com, aol.com, outlook.com, etc.). However, many businesses and organizations (small and large) use their own domain names for their e-mail identities, e.g., user@mybusinessname.com, user@myorgname.org, etc., even though “behind the scenes” they are using Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (or others) for handling their e-mail.  When those private domain names are not properly configured to explicitly authorize the forwarding of their mail by other domains, e.g., Google, Yahoo or Microsoft; our defense mechanism suspects e-mail from these domains as “spoofed” sender identities and blocks them.

When suspicious messages to valid Township addresses are blocked (mail to user@sbtnj.net or user@sbpdnj.net), there is no message sent back to the sender.  So, if you don’t receive a timely response to an e-mail you’ve sent to the Township, it is likely that your message was blocked (never delivered).   If you aren’t getting a response to your e-mail in a timely manner, try sending a test e-mail message addressed to unknown@sbtnj.net. Within a few minutes, you should receive a reply back from your own mail system that unknown@sbtnj.net could not be found.  If you do not get any reply back from your test message, then your e-mail to the Township is indeed being blocked, and it is likely that anyone mailing from your domain to the Township is being blocked as well.  Once you have confirmed your e-mail is being blocked, you need to refer the issue to whomever supports and manages your private domain name.  In the meantime, you can either re-send your e-mail to a personal account (in a different domain) and then forward it from there to the Township, or you will need to contact the Township via other means (e.g., phone, USPS, etc.)  If you can provide us with the contact information for whomever supports your “domain name”, please use the form below to give us the details.  We would be happy to  reach out to your support person to try to resolve the issue.  

Types of inspections/validations we perform on all incoming e-mail:

  • The address of the sender is subjected to a number of tests intended to detect e-mail spoofing (“pretending” to come from other people or e-mail domains). These tests include “No SPF record”, “No PTR record”, “DKIM Validation failure” and “DMARC failure”. 
  • Website links are inspected to see if each link results in going to that website or going somewhere else. (A link can appear to point to irs.gov, but when you click it, the link takes you to some other web site.)
  • Attached files are scanned for known software viruses. Certain attachment file types are not allowed at all, e.g., executable programs, scripts and macros.
  • Several types of files, e.g., PDFs, Word and plain text files, are also scanned for bad website links as described above.
  • E-mail messages are scanned for well-known phrases that are typically used by spammers and malicious actors, e.g., “A voicemail message has arrived in your mailbox”, “Act now…,” “You’ve been selected…,” “100% free,” “You won a prize…”, etc.
  • There are a number of other validations performed including the use of “blacklisted” senders (organizations known to be sources of viruses, SPAM, etc.), e-mail coming from certain foreign locations, etc.

You can use the form below to report to us if you think your e-mails are being blocked and your IT organization wishes to have a technical discussion with us to mitigate the problem. Please fill in this form providing us with the details along with the contact information of a person who is able to discuss and adjust the  “DNS entries for your domain”. 

Put in here the EXACT e-mail address you suspect is being blocked when sending e-mail to users @ sbtnj.net or sbpdnj.net. This is the person we will reply to.
Give us just one Township e-mail address even if you sent the message to multiple addresses
e.g., 12/23/2025 01:30 PM
someone who can make changes to your domain's Name Server settings to fix the reason(s) why your e-mail is being blocked
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