AccessIt User Experience sending batch emails of Overdue letters

[JSpaced]

Hey all, hope this is the right place to post this. It's enterprise software, but it's also in the cloud and also relates to my on premises Exchange so.... not sure where this should have gone.

First of all the story so far:

 

We've purchased Accessit and our librarians love it.

We've struggled with sending out the bulk emails via our Exchange server using SMTP.

I eventually cornered the problem as the MessageRateLimit property of our Exchange Receive Connectors.

 

If I raise the MessageRateLimit to 200 per minute, no more problem.

 

Unfortunately I fear that if a user's credentials are compromised and we don't hear about it, malware could send 1,000 emails in five minutes before we've clamped down on it.

 

So I'm looking at AccessIt's built in rate limiters. I'm looking at a 15000 ms delay between emails (1 per 15 seconds) and batches of 4 emails per connection.

 

We haven't got any bulk emails to send, so I'm wondering if anyone knows what the user experience will be using these limits?

 

Does AccessIt collate the emails, queue them, then release the user back to normal experience and send the emails in the background?

 

OR

 

Does AccessIT present a progress bar and hold the user on this screen UNTIL the last email of the last batch has been sent?

 

Does anyone have any experience of this? (I have asked AccessIt the same question, but I thought I'd see if anyone had hands-on experience.

 

Thanks in advance,

J

[TechMonkey]

No help but thank you for bringing this up. We had O365 warnings flag the account that send our library emails and then it shut the account down due to it being suspicious. I was glad to see our systems worked but was wondering how to fix this. I'll watch with interest.

[JSpaced]

No help but thank you for bringing this up. We had O365 warnings flag the account that send our library emails and then it shut the account down due to it being suspicious. I was glad to see our systems worked but was wondering how to fix this. I'll watch with interest.

 

Yeah it literally gathers up a bunch of messages in SMTP then rams them through one connection, unless you set the delay and batch settings.

I couldn't find any GUI settings in hostname.com/ecp to correct this, it was all through Powershell.

Get-receiveconnector and set-receiveconnector are where I ended up (thank you Google).

 

If it is the second one and AccessIT "locks up" until the batches are done, I think I'll have to have a scheduled Powershell task to up the limit for an hour every week to allow the librarians to do this!

[TechMonkey]

Did you manage to get any more info on this? Looks like it is happening every Friday night for us, I'm guessing that is when the scheduled email is set to go out, so I think I need to sort this sooner than I predicted!

[JSpaced]

Did you manage to get any more info on this? Looks like it is happening every Friday night for us, I'm guessing that is when the scheduled email is set to go out, so I think I need to sort this sooner than I predicted!

 

Apparently Wednesday is our chase up day at the library, I'll let you know.

J

[Chaniel]

Our library notification email got disabled last night by O365 due to the outbound spam rules, the documented limit for sending via Exchange Online is 30 per minute. I wasn't 100% on how the batch settings worked, so I submitted a ticket and got the following response;

 

I would suggest you create a delay of 5000 ms sending out 2 emails per batch, which will in terms be sending out 24 emails/minute.

If the Automated Overdue emails are set to run automatically from the BTS (which in your case they are) this should be handled nicely.

 

If however at any point in time your librarian decides to manually send out overdue emails, it would still only send 2 emails every 5 seconds - something to keep in mind.

 

And then when queried about running the task manually;

 

The BTS service runs directly on our cloud server. This is why the Automated Overdues Task does not interfere with your installed Accessit Management App.

 

If however the emails would be sent manually, the task would run on your local computer and it would run as long as it takes for all emails to be sent. That is why I suggest that the task is run on a separate computer. If you would like to get Accessit installed onto another (separate) computer in the library for those purposes, we can get that sorted without any additional costs.

 

So if they were to run the task manually, it'd lock up the management app for that time. Hope that helps!

Edited January 21, 2020 by Chaniel

[JSpaced]

So if they were to run the task manually, it'd lock up the management app for that time. Hope that helps!

 

That's exactly the answer I was looking for and still haven't had it from AccessIt!!! Our Librarians use the manual system rather than the BTS.

 

We just tried it with an outrageous 15000 ms delay in batches of 4. Our highest number is 9 consecutive emails before the system stops with an error.

 

Our current system limit is 5 in 1 minute.

 

At the moment I'm looking at creating a dedicated relay connection in Exchange and limiting it to the IP addresses of the Library workstations. Has anyone figured a decent solution to this?

 

I've also asked to be put in touch with schools successfully using this system and still haven't heard back on that either...

[TechMonkey]

Well I have set the 5000 to 2 and I will see what happens Friday night. We are on an automatic process but I will warn the Librarian if she clicks it manually.

[TechMonkey]

Update. I still get a warning but it doesn't lock the account. I may adjust it to be a bit slower so we don't get an email every week but otherwise it is OK.

[JSpaced]

Update. I still get a warning but it doesn't lock the account. I may adjust it to be a bit slower so we don't get an email every week but otherwise it is OK.

 

With the help of some great fellow Edugeeks, I was able to create a usable Receive Connector in Exchange, tied to an IP range, a custom SMTP port and a specific Exchange User. Now we've hit our third-party anti-spam so I need to get that resolved.

All good fun.