6.1.5 Email tips, duplicates and sender issues

Maximise chances of successful delivery

There are a numbers of ways in which you can reduce the likelihood of your Beacon emails not being delivered:

1. Minimise the frequency of sending emails to similar large lists (over 50) of recipients. It is better to delay until you have more information to put into a single email.
   
   
2. Avoid sending emails that the majority of recipients won't bother to open. It encourages the system to assume that messages from the sender are spam.
   
   
3. If you are sending an email to a large number of people, say over 50, please accept that your email will be processed by spam filters in the same way as mass marketing emails. Therefore you should follow the following industry guidelines for such mail.
   
   i) Avoid or minimise sending attachments when sending an email to large lists of recipients. It is tempting to do so, as Beacon and SendGrid enable you to do so, but it is recommended instead to put the files on to your website and to provide a weblink to let the user download the file if they want. You can alternatively use services such as Dropbox.
   
   ii) When putting a link (URL) into an email, do NOT use the URL itself as the clickable visible text. Instead use some descriptive English text. Note that this is the opposite of Beacon's previous guidance and is due to the way SendGrid handles links, and you may need to change some of your standard email messages.
   
   iii) Maximum organisation visibility helps as well. Including your physical mailing address and phone number in your email footers helps mail providers recognise you as a legitimate organisation and sender of email. This also helps your recipients know that this message is indeed from you!
   
   iv) Provide an explicit way for the recipient to unsubscribe from getting emails from you, even though you know they have said they want such emails. For example at the bottom of your email: "To unsubscribe from these mails email memsec@youru3a with subject unsubscribe from emails."

Duplicate emails to the same address

Sometimes members share an email address and this means that the Beacon member record for those members will have the same email address. When emails for these members are sent then duplicate emails will be dispatched by Beacon. However, there are circumstances where these duplicates go missing.

Emails for Beacon go to a specialist bulk emailer SendGrid. In order to protect against errors and to protect their industry spamming reputation, SendGrid filter out duplicates where the email, including titles and contents, are identical. Should you wish to get round this then personalising the content of an email using a tag such as "Dear #FAM," (to generate Dear Graham, etc.) will ensure the email gets through SendGrid.

Unfortunately, some email providers will do their own filtering of duplicate emails based on unpublished rules. For example, Gmail has been observed to do this, perhaps based on a score derived from delivery time, identical title and other spam assessments.

Beacon e-mail appears to have been sent by the wrong person

u3a members may experience problems whereby e-mails sent to them through Beacon appear to have been sent by someone other than the person actually sending them. This problem is generally at device level and so members with multiple devices may experience it on some but not all devices. Likewise, members may experience the problem on more than one device but with each reporting a different 'wrong' sender.

The problem is due to the contact details, of a previously received Beacon e-mail, having been saved in the Address book/Contacts on the device(s). The solution is to check the Address book/Contacts on the affected device(s) and delete any entry associated with e-mail address [e-mail]. To prevent a recurrence, members should not save the contact details of any Beacon e-mail.

The reason is that all Beacon e-mail, regardless of the sender or the u3a, has the same From: address of [e-mail]. Beacon e-mails also have a Reply-To: field that contains the name and e-mail address of the sender and provides the return path to them for any replies.

If a member, receiving a Beacon e-mail, saves the contact details in their Address book/Contacts, they will be saved with the sender's name, as in the Reply-To: field, but with Beacon's From: address - [e-mail]. Consequently, all future Beacon emails received on that device will appear to come from that same person regardless of the actual person sending them. As an example, if Jane Smith of Any u3a sends a Beacon e-mail and a member receiving it saves the contact details, all subsequent e-mail received from Beacon on that device will appear to have been sent by Jane Smith regardless of the actual sender.   

This is not a quirk or fault of Beacon mail but the way in which e-mail Address books/Contacts work. 

Hotmail tips

Hotmail is one of a few service providers that returns good status but then discards the mail if the sender's address or domain name is on the Blocked senders list.

First, go to the Blocked senders list and in the search field enter "u3abeacon.org.uk" (without the quotes)  and delete all entries found.
Then, add the full beacon e-mail address "[e-mail]" or just the domain "u3abeacon.org.uk" (no quotes) to the Safe senders list.

Revision History

v1	2021-05-04	Graham Tigg	Combines three articles and moved to the User Guide
v2	2023-11-15	Graham Tigg	Added safe sender suggestion
v3	2023-12-23	Graham Tigg	Added Hotmail specific tips