[sims] Communications not going to parents

[rossibIT]

Afternoon all,

 

Just want to pick your brains

 

Since September I have had a handful of parents that have said they have not received any emails from the school from out SIMS communication address. I have seen the emails where parents have been receiving them fine then all of a sudden, nothing has been going to the parents email address. The latest one happening over the weekend.

 

I have asked the parents to come in and have personally whitelisted the address and checked to make sure that the email address has not been blocked. Which it hasn't but even whitelisting the address has not worked. The only way I have been able to sort out the issue is by getting the parent to create a new email address.

 

My first train of thought is students blocking it on parents device, but this is happening to 'good' students who wouldn't mind what gets sent out to parents, and with it happening to parents across the school I am hesitant to think this is the reason why. With how many parents have said about this I am worried if I have 100's of parents coming to me in the next couple of months to say about the same issue.

 

Any help much appreciated.

 

Ross

[mavhc]

What's the IP of the server sending those emails? Is it in your SPF?

[David44]

Looking at the headers of emails that I have received, at some point it looks like ESS changed from using outlook.com to send the InTouch emails to using flowmailer.com. Not sure when this was but I have an email from 31st August 2022 that used outlook.com, the next email I have access to is from 20 October 2022 and that and every other email I have received from InTouch since is via flowmailer.com.

 

I don't know flowmailer.com but it's possible a change in provider may cause emails not to be delivered as reliably as before. ESS also have a secret list of email addresses that they don't even bother sending emails to. If a parent has blocked an email (whether they know it or not), it may be they ESS (or their provider) will never try that address again until you have contacted them and had it removed from the list. I have had to do that a few times recently via our SSU.

[mikes]

Is this with Intouch, we had an issue with incoming mail not showing up, we had to file a ticket with ESS

[rossibIT]

What's the IP of the server sending those emails? Is it in your SPF?

 

Yes, I don't believe this to be the issue as it has it been resolved with changing the parents email address.

 

it may be they ESS (or their provider) will never try that address again until you have contacted them and had it removed from the list. I have had to do that a few times recently via our SSU.

 

Hmmm, may look into this.

 

Is this with Intouch, we had an issue with incoming mail not showing up, we had to file a ticket with ESS

Yes it was with Intouch. What was the end result of this?

[mikes]

Our symptom was one day our attendance officer sent out the usual absenses, and then at 2pm she contacted me to say - she hadn't had a single parent reply to her about them, which is odd as usually it's 5 - 10 every single day.

So we tested, outgoing mail were sent OK, but if we replied to those mails, nothing would show up in SIMS intouch.

 

So the fact that every single one of your outgoings are failing, it's either something with their backend, or have you checked the SIMS intouch module settings "test e-mail" button?

Our data manager had a login for the ESS SIMS support forum and I posted on there, basically in a day the e-mails were coming in and they got back to me saying there'd been a backend issue. Since then our intouch have been going out fine (other than the hotmail/sky/yahoo addresses blacklisting the intouch outgoing address as spam... you'd hope that if this happened, ESS would have a secondary mailing address/server they could send from instead of just junking the e-mail....)