Sending email to Client, Staff, or Companies is a technical process involving multiple parties and steps. The sender, recipient, email domains, IP addresses, whitelists, blacklists, spam filters, and junk mail folders are all factors involved in making sure a successfully sent email is received. Every person involved in the email process bears part of the responsibility to make sure the email process is successful.
- Spam: Email spamming can cause the IP address of the user's organization and/or the IP address of Xenegrade servers to be placed on a blocked email listing. Xenegrade requires all users to follow rules, regulations, and laws regarding sending email including giving recipients an Opt-Out option to not receive emails. Xenegrade reserves the right to disable the email function of organizations that do not follow standard and accepted email practices.
- Rate Limits: Many internet providers set rate limits on email. Those limits may be applied using metrics such as: Recipients per message, Recipients per hour, Recipients per connection, and/or Simultaneous or concurrent connections. Note the use of the word recipients, not messages, when referencing rate limits. One message to one hundred recipients or one hundred messages each to one recipient may both count as one hundred recipients toward the sending IP's limit. Additionally, rates imposed on an IP may vary based on several criteria, including past sending history. IPs with a history of sending wanted mail will enjoy higher rate limits than will either IPs with a history of sending mail that draws complaints and/or triggers spam filter or IPs that have no recent history of sending any mail to customers. Also, rate limits on inbound mail, and servers that exceed those rate limits may receive error messages in response to their attempts to send mail inbound to customers.
- Rejected Emails: If the emails generated by the XenDirect Admin, QuickTools, and WebReg modules are either not arriving or you are receiving a message that looks like the email cannot be delivered, you may need to have the Xenegrade email server “white listed”. Xenegrade sends the email notification To and From the email address you supplied in the Notification Email field in the Branch Profile. Some corporate mail servers can reject this email being sent. Contact your IT department to have the Xenegrade email server white listed. The Xenegrade email server address is smtp.xenegrade.net.
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Emails not being received: When sending emails using XenDirect, you are sending an email via a third party email system. This means that you are using XenDirect email server to send emails, but utilizing the email address that is set in your branch profile or notification setting as the actual sender. Once an email is sent using XenDirect, Xenegrade no longer has control over where and how the email gets delivered. Depending on the receiver's email settings, there are times when emails may be delivered to the receivers spam/junk folder. If the receiver is using a corporate email address, their organization may block emails from third-party email senders. When clients report not receiving an email:
- Have them check their spam/junk folder.
- Verify that a case note was entered into the client’s profile. If a case was entered, this confirms that the email was delivered.
- If the email address is a corporate address, the client should contact their IT department regarding third party emails.
- Make sure the client is using forgot password/username function, ensure they are entering the email that is associated with their client profile.
- Test an email yourself using the same function to an email you have access to. You may have to recreate a similar situation to mimic the same behavior as the client's issue.
Some things to consider:
- The number of emails that are not received is probably extremely low compared to how many emails that are sent. To check out how many client emails you send per month, go to the InSight visualization report called "Client Email Counts".
- Consider requesting a DKIM text entry for the domain you use to send email FROM. Xenegrade can provide a string of text that would be entered into your DNS settings by someone from your IT department. Emails still send from the Xenegrade domain, but other email servers check your DNS. That DKIM record basically shows that the Xenegrade domain is allowed to send on your behalf.
- Consider sending emails from your SMTP server.
How to Report Email Issues
Follow these steps when reporting email issues related to any of the XenDirect modules.
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Confirm that the email was sent. Do you see a case note and/or message log record for the email that was sent?
- If there is no case note or message log record, either (a) the email was not sent or (b) there was an error in the process before the email went out. If (b), submit a detailed support ticket.
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Confirm that the recipient's email is correct.
- If not, correct the email and resend the email.
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Confirm that the email is not in the recipient's junk or spam folder.
- If the email is in the junk folder, the recipient needs to add Xenegrade in the allowed email list of their email application.
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If none of the above are the cause, submit a detailed support ticket with this information.
- Date, time, recipient and method used to send the email.
- Email address of the recipient. The domain is especially important.
- Did the recipient try a different email with a different domain? Sometimes the issue is the email domain. The domain is the text to the right of the @ symbol in the email address.
- Describe the issue (i.e. email not received, banner missing from email, email not formatted, etc.)
- Provide any other information that will help determine the issue.
Xenegrade will first try to confirm that the email was sent out by the email function. If the email displays in the logs as sent, the process of determining why the recipient did not receive the email becomes more difficult. Your assistance in the research becomes important at this time to help narrow down the cause. Xenegrade may request that you contact the recipient with specific questions.
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Rick Stern
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