Communications: Email Delivery Issues

Covered in this Article:

• Possible Reasons Communication is Not Delivered & How to Resolve
• How SwimTopia Tries to Prevent Spam Issues
• How You Can Prevent Spam Issues

Possible Reasons Communication is Not Delivered & How to Resolve

➧ Previous Season Does Not Contain Any People

If you are trying to send to the "Members (Previous Season)" group and no one has received your communication, check to make sure your "previous season" is not marked as Unofficial (by-passed for messages), or that you do not have two seasons created for your most current season.

You can tell from the People page if you have duplicate seasons by looking at your "Season" drop-down list. If you see two of the same seasons there, someone likely created two on accident. The one that does not have data (people in your roster, role assignments) should be deleted from the Schedule > Seasons page.

You can also go straight to your Schedule > Seasons tab to see if a duplicate season was created, or if your "previous season" is configured to be "Unofficial," which would be skipped in any communication.

➧ No Email Entered, or Unsubscribed During Registration

Only one parent is required to be subscribed to team emails during registration. To confirm this is not the issue, go check they have an email entered and did not uncheck the option to receive team emails. You can do this from their profile under Manage Team > People

If they are unsubscribed, the button will say so and you can reverse this by clicking on the button again.

➧ Misspelled Email Address

Make sure they are using a current email for their website login account, and that it has no typos in Manage Team > People. If you do notice a typo, try editing the account to make the correction.

Did you receive a "This email is already taken" error?

What sometimes happens is that during registration, a parent enters their email with a typo, which creates a new parent account and leaves the first account with the correct email still in our database. Because SwimTopia uses unique email addresses for logins, you will get an error when trying to update/correct the email address. Or they may have used the correct email in a previous season on your site, or on another team using SwimTopia.

Let us know so that we can investigate and make the correction. Submit a request with the name/email, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up asap. 

➧ Team Messages Marked as Spam

Users inadvertently click the "Spam" button when they mean to click delete all the time (in some programs, the Spam button is right next to Delete). Email providers (Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail) take those reports very seriously and if we continue to send email to an address after they have reported us for spam greatly increases the likelihood that all emails we send to that provider will be flagged as spam. For that reason, once an address has reported an email as spam, we stop trying to send messages to that address. 

Submit a request with the name/email, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up asap. If this is the cause, we’ll need to obtain permission from the end-user to remove the spam block, per policy, so we are not blacklisted for making the change without permission.

If this becomes common for many users to do, it gradually increases the “spamminess” designation of all SwimTopia teams’ messages, which can cause issues for all of your members eventually.

There isn’t much we can do about spam filtering issues. I would encourage your parents to add your team’s “sender” address to their approved sender's list somehow.

Such as ​notifier+austinangelfish@swimtopia.net​
That’s different than the “reply-to” which is the account that’s sending the message.

➧ Bounced Email

If an email has bounced more than once, our system will stop trying to send to them. 

 Submit a request with the name/email, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up asap. If this is the cause, we’ll need to obtain permission from the end-user to remove the block, per policy, so we are not blacklisted for making the change without permission. If we unblock them and there's still an issue of their email bouncing, it will be blocked by the system again, so the user may need to investigate issues on their end as well.

➧ None of the Above...

Other times, when we check, we find that we are sending and delivering the emails to their mail provider, but that's as far as we can see. It's up to the mail provider to get the mail to their inbox, and up to the end-user to not mark it as spam.

So if an email doesn't show up on our spam logs, or error logs, and we see that we have "delivered" it to their mail provider, then it really goes back to the user to do some checking. 

You would ask them to do the following:

1. Search for the exact mail subject in their email
2. Search for swimtopia.net​ in their email, including spam and trash
3. Use the "Forgot your password?" link on the login screen to send themselves a reset email. This uses the same mechanism as a regular email from the team. If they don't receive it, proceed to #4.
4. Check with the mail provider (MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, corporate...) and see if something is keeping the emails from reaching their inbox.

If they do find your message in their junk folder, ask them to click the “this isn’t spam” button, that should help future messages be filtered.

How SwimTopia Tries to Prevent Spam Issues

Email service providers will sometimes not deliver a message they consider spam where our logs indicate it was delivered.

We have changed the way that we send outgoing messages from Communications which should even further improve our email delivery and protect more messages from being flagged as spam. 

All outgoing messages are sent with the name of the sender from a generic "noreply" email address at swimtopia.com. In addition, a special “Reply-To” header has been added to the message so that replies will still be delivered to the sender’s actual email address. Example:

From: Janet Doe (via SwimTopia) <noreply+teamname@swimtopia.com>
Reply-to: Janet Doe <janet.doe@megamail.com>

We append “(via SwimTopia)” to the friendly name in the from address to make clear that the email address is routed through SwimTopia to avoid confusion with the sender’s actual email address.

When an email client does not recognize the "reply-to" address and sends the reply directly to <noreply+teamname@swimtopia.com>, an auto-responder will be sent immediately, alerting the sender that their message was not delivered and to check the reply email address. 

See our blog post about Improved Email Delivery for more information.

» Note: If you are suspecting many did not receive the communication, we can look up individual email addresses and/or email subject lines to get a quick report of undelivered messages, but there is no notification sent to us or to you at the time the message fails.

How You Can Prevent Spam Issues

We do everything we can behind the scenes to prevent any messages from being marked as spam by email service providers, but there are things within the message that you can do as well:

• The higher the text to link and text to image ratios, the better. Too many links and images trigger spam flags at ESPs. 
• Misspellings, spammy words (buy now!, Free!) are big spam flags, as are ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
• Links should include the domain that is sending the email. Also, popular url shorteners can be a bad idea because they are frequently used by spammers.

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