I’m trying to answer what seems like a simple question. We’ve got a large number of student library cards we issued in bulk and used the school’s address. Most of the account we made had email addresses but not all of them. So there’s maybe 1200 accounts with no email address, but with email picked as the notification option. Gut instinct says that it would just default to mail, because that’s what’s happening.
I found the section in Leap helped called ‘Email failure detection’, which says that if it tests an address and can’t send to it then it goes with mail.
I have one particular event I’m looking at. I did an SQL query of this patron for the particular time period and I see the notification that was sent. It’s a 1st Overdue. Delivery was Mailing Address. I check Notification in Admin and I see that 1st Overdue notices are set to Patron Preference. I ran a Polaris report of E-mail delivery failures that would include the date of the notification that was send. There’s nothing listed on it.
Am I correct in thinking that if notifications are set to email and there isn’t one it doesn’t bother with testing and just defaults to mail? And if I want to stop that, I can switch the notifications to ‘None’?
First: Don’t set the notification preference to “None”. Polaris requires some form of notification to process subsequent overdue notifications and billing, so setting someone’s preference to “None” will effectively exempt them from automatic billing for lost items.
I think you’re correct about the email fallback. I’ve done some work in our system to change notification preferences to “Mailing Address” for accounts without email addresses… not that we’re actually mailing out notices… that stopped back in 2020 and frankly, it just isn’t worth the staff time and postage… no one who is going to return or pay for items voluntarily is doing so because they got a letter in the mail… Anyway, this means I have to “Print” and “Post” the notices each day in order to get the overdue/billing to process correctly… which is a pain, but it beats people not being billed for items just because we can’t send them an email… After realizing this, I adjusted some of our policies to “Block for Long Overdue” and set that period to our normal billing period. That way patron accounts will be blocked even when I’m not able to post the mailing notices that day (because I can’t be doing that all 365 days of the year). I’m not sure if maybe this is the sort of thing you’re dealing with, but this is where my head goes when I see a question about notice delivery… If there’s something else your concerned about, I’d be curious to hear the details!
I’ll also mention that LX Starter can use the API to change a patron’s notification preferences for you when there are delivery failures. I don’t know if you all are using LX Starter or not, but it reduces the need to check up on patron notification preferences regularly.