Common Email Blast Delivery Issues
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Common Email Blast Delivery Issues
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Why have some electors not received the email blast?
Once an email blast has been sent, recipients may not immediately receive their message. Below are a few important pieces of information to keep in mind. You can also review Managing Bad Emails in the Election Manager Guide for more explanation.
General Transmit Time
Emails transit from Simply Voting's outgoing email server to other email servers until messages reach their final destination, with no guarantee on how long any given message will reside at each intermediary stop. Various factors such as the size of your email blast or network congestion at any point in the delivery process may influence the time it takes for an email to reach its final destination.
Resolution:
For this reason, please allow at least 15 minutes before emails make it to the recipients’ mailboxes before investigating any potential issues.
Unsubscribes
Any elector who clicked on an "unsubscribe" link in a previously sent email blast will not receive a message at all. By performing this unsubscribe action, the recipient signaled that they do not wish to receive any further messages from the voting system. An elector may wish unsubscribe for any number of reasons.
Resolution:
Electors who are unsubscribed can re-subscribe themselves to future email blasts by simply sending an email to resubscribe@simplyvoting.com from the unsubscribed email address. Thus, if you have determined any individuals have unsubscribed, you can contact those individuals to let them know they need to re-subscribe by following the instructions above. If an elector re-subscribes, they will be removed from the Bad Emails list, and you can then send out an email blast to specific electors. Alternatively, their email address may be included as part of a future email blast to electors that have not voted yet, if any are scheduled.
Spam Reports
Any individual who has previously reported an email from the voting system as spam will not receive a message at all. An individual may report a message as spam because they are tired of reminders, dislike the organization that is sending the email, or it may be an accident. You can think of a spam report as a stronger or more permanent type of unsubscribe request.
Resolution:
Electors who reported a past email as spam can re-subscribe themselves to future email blasts by simply sending an email to resubscribe@simplyvoting.com from the unsubscribed email address. Thus, if you have determined any individuals have reported their emails as spam, you can contact those individuals to let them know they need to re-subscribe by following the instructions above. If an elector re-subscribes, they will be removed from the Bad Emails list, and you can then send out an email blast to specific electors. Alternatively, their email address may be included as part of a future email blast to electors that have not voted yet, if any are scheduled.
Bounce Reports
If an email address has a bounce report, it indicates that messages were sent, but the recipient's receiving email server returned a notice that the message was undeliverable for some reason (e.g. "invalid recipient" / "user unknown / "mailbox unavailable" / "email account not found" ). Other reasons may also exist, such as where one or more email messages were throttled or rejected by a private domain with overly strict spam rules, an individual's mailbox is full and can't accept any new messages, etc.
Resolution:
Users can either seek corrections (e.g. maybe there is a mispelling in the email address that isn't immediately apparent, etc.) by some other method of contact that is available, or seek alternate email addresses for any electors. Once elector records are udpated, an email blast to specific electors can be sent.
Bounces Related to Private Email Domain Throttling or Filtering
Private email domains, such as those managed by specific organizations, may have their own unique and specific rules for handling external email senders like Simply Voting. This may result in limiting the amount of emails received from an external sender, or accepting messages as delivered and later filtering them, preventing them from reaching the elector's inbox.
Resolution:
If the electors experiencing email throttling or bouncing all have the same private email domain and the domain is managed by your organization, please contact support to receive additional technical information that can help any email server administrators from your organization to whitelist Simply Voting's email servers.
If your organization doesn't manage one or more of the private email domains experiencing issues, you could reach out to the managers of those private email domains to see if they are willing to whitelist Simply Voting's email servers. If they are willing, please contact support to receive additional technical information. If organization(s) are unwilling, seek alternate email addresses for any electors. Once elector records are udpated, an email blast to specific electors can be sent.
Invalid Syntax
If an email address is reported as having invalid syntax, this means the email address is malformed and cannot be delivered to due to that malformation (e.g. johnsmith@gmail instead of johnsmith@gmail.com ; janehotmail.com instead of jane@hotmail.com ; @outlook.com which is missing a recipient before the @ ; fernanda@.com which is missing a domain after the @ ; etc).
Resolution:
Users can investigate and determine if the syntax errors have easily recognizable fixes (e.g. add ".com" to any email address, or otherwise formatting that properly). If so, once elector records are udpated, an email blast to specific electors can be sent.
If such errors are not easily recognizable, you can either seek corrections by some other method of contact that is available, or seek alternate email addresses for any electors. Once elector records are udpated, an email blast to specific electors can be sent.