Has anyone come up with a non-technical way to explain why bell.net & sympatico.ca email users don’t receive our email notices? It’s a known issue with Bell and not internal but we need a way to explain it to staff/clients.
We have several older clients on bell/sympatico email addresses who don’t receive our emails. When we check the notices section of their account, the notices went out. We had this same issue with our previous ILS and IT determined it was a Bell issue, not an internal issue since it only affects those specific email address types. Was hoping for some nicer wording to give to staff for when they need to explain the issue to a client.
First, I would test an email notice by sending one to a service like: https://www.mail-tester.com/ this will confirm that all your email settings are set up properly. You’ll have to time this properly by setting up a hold to go out around the time you’ve put the mail-tester random email address into a patron’s account.
Sending email is known as one of the hardest problems in computers and there are lots of settings that you need to make sure are set up properly. A service like mail-tester can help you pinpoint if anything might have been missed.
In terms of communicating with patrons, here is a chatgpt suggestion:
Dear [Library Name] Patron,
We hope this message finds you well. We wanted to inform you that we recently encountered an issue delivering emails to some of our valued patrons, including yourself. After investigating, it appears that the problem stems from certain settings or restrictions with your email provider.
To ensure you continue to receive important updates, notifications, and resources from us, you might consider the following steps with your email provider:
Check Spam or Junk Folders: Sometimes, legitimate emails may be mistakenly filtered. Please review these folders and mark our emails as “Not Spam” if you find them there.
Allow list Our Email Address: Adding our library’s email address (yourlibraryemail@example.com) to your contacts or safe sender list can help ensure our messages reach your inbox directly.
Review Email Filters and Settings: Occasionally, specific filters or security settings can block incoming emails. Adjusting these settings to allow emails from our domain may resolve the issue.
Contact Your Email Provider: If the problem persists, reaching out to your email provider’s support team can provide additional assistance to ensure our communications are successfully delivered.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and are here to help! If you continue to experience difficulties or would like to change to an alternative notification method, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [library contact information]. We value your membership and want to ensure you have access to all the resources and information you need.
Aside from that you could also try contacting the email providers to see if they can put your email IPs on their allow list. That can take time and persistence, but ultimately would yield to an improved service for your patrons and would stem the regularly communication you have to do with them on this topic.
Thank you Wes! This was all very helpful info. I’ve passed it along to our IT and Client Experience teams so they can decide the best course of action.