Diagnosing and Resolving Delivery Issues

➧ Season is Duplicated or Unofficial

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

By design, unofficial seasons are skipped when mailing to this group. Go to Manage Team > Schedule > Seasons and see if your previous season has "(Unofficial)" next to it. If so, and you don't want this, click to edit the season, uncheck that box, and save.

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 by 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."

➞ Duplicate Season Example: 

➞ Unofficial Example:

➧ No Email or Not Subscribed to Team Communications

Only one member from each account is required to be subscribed to team emails. To confirm this is not the issue, go to Manage Team > People > click into their profile:

Confirm that they have an email listed Confirm they are "SUBSCRIBED" in their profile.
If they are unsubscribed, click the "Send activation instructions" button to initiate an email so they can resubscribe.

» Note: Keep in mind, this does not exclude them from the "Parents" group, which takes precedence over the unsubscribe setting. However, that group should only be used in emergency situations to keep from upsetting your members who do not wish to receive team communication.

➧ Misspelled Email Address

Make sure the email registered has no typos in Manage Team > People. If you do notice a typo, try editing the account to correct it.

Is the email enabled for another user?

This indicates another user on your team has this email assigned to their account, likely from a previous season. A link to the user account is provided so you can determine if the user is the same person. 

If it's the same user you are attempting to update, this indicates a duplicate account - one with the correct email, and one without an incorrect email. 

Check your De-Duplicate Parents (or Athletes) tool to see if you can merge the duplicate accounts. You can get to these from your Settings > Data Maintenance Tools (or the "Manage duplicate people" link on your People page)

If the user is not listed as a duplicate, let us know so that we can investigate and make the correction. Submit a support ticket with the name/emails, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up. 

➧ User's Email is Not Affiliated with the Active Season

Make sure they are checking for the team emails/alerts from an account that has a parent or athlete affiliation with the active season in Manage Team > People > Affiliations.

If the email they are using to log into the team website or mobile app is not affiliated with the active season, that's a clue that they are either not registered for the active season or their active affiliation is under a different email than they expect.

They may have started registering and then backed out or walked away to get their credit card, and by the time they returned, their registration may have timed out (happens when the team uses registration limits). This puts their form in an incomplete state. A process clears these out daily, but if they try to use the same email again before this form is cleared, they will not be able to, and many users will just add a different email and forget they did this later. 

First, look to see what email was used for their account that is affiliated with the active season, and ask the user if they are looking for the team emails/alerts from that account, or from an account that was not used on a completed registration form this season. If they provide the email, you could search for that in previous seasons.

As noted in the scenario above, it's possible a duplicate account exists that you can merge. Check your De-Duplicate Parents (or Athletes) tool. You can get to these from your Settings > Data Maintenance Tools (or the "Manage duplicate people" link on your People page)

If the user is not listed as a duplicate, let us know so that we can investigate and make the correction. Submit a support ticket with the name/emails, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up. 

➧ Messages Marked as Spam

At times, members inadvertently click the "Spam" button when they mean to click "Delete" (in some programs, they are next to each other). 

Email providers (Google, Yahoo!, and Hotmail) take those reports very seriously. If we continue to send emails to an address after they have reported the email as spam, this 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. 

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

➞ What to do if you suspect there is a spam block issue:

Submit a request with the name/email, and a Customer Happiness Specialist will follow up asap. Including an email proving the user wants the spam block removed will expedite the update. 

Without this proof, we may need to obtain permission from the end user, so we are not blacklisted for making the change without permission. It would expedite this process if you could include an email from the users showing they approve the block removal.

➞ How your team admins 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.
• Encourage your parents to add your team’s “sender” address to their safelist/allowlist/whitelist - Such as ​notifier+austinangelfish@swimtopia.net​ (that’s different than the “reply-to” which is the account that’s sending the message.)
• Send this link to your families for specific directions based on their mail provider. ➞ How can my subscribers safelist me?

➞ 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 suspect 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.

➧ Bounced Email

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

 Submit a request with the user's name/email, and we will follow up ASAP. If this is the cause, we may 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 with 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, which should help future messages be filtered. Also, send this link to your families for specific directions to safelist your emails based on their mail provider. ➞ How can my subscribers safelist me?