OLX not receiving email notifications for new donations

Judi Umbreit

Hi Everyone, On tab 5 of the OLX donation form set up there is a field where one can add email addresses for staff members who should receive a copy of the confirmation for each gift. Several months ago we started having problems with staff not receiving the copies. BB said that because we had more than 3 email addresses listed the ISPs were considering the receipts to be spam and were blocking them. I removed all but three email addresses but only two of them are actually receiving the copies.  Is anyone else having this issue? Please share with me if you have a resolution or suggestion.

Many thanks!

Judi

 

Chris Martin

Hi Judi Umbreit‍. I think we might have unfortunately given you bad information. I don't believe the number of staff notification recipients to be the cause of some of those recipients not getting these notifications. I think it's more likely that we might have one of the recipients being auto-suppressed due to a prior hard bounce or something along those lines. If you're comfortable messaging me directly with the email address of the recipient who isn't getting these notifications, we can look up whether they're being auto-suppressed. Alternatively, you could reach out via our normal support channels and ask that we confirm whether this one notification recipient is currently being blacklisted (e.g. due to a prior hard-bounce or accidental spam complaint).


Thanks!

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Judi Umbreit

Hi Chris,

I replied directly to your email with more specifics. We have done what you suggested  many times. 

Thank you,

Judi

Judi Umbreit

Hi Chris,

 

Thank you for responding.  This has been an issue that happens quite often. Would you look at our support case 017399592?  It’s closed now, but I want to reopen it because I prefer not to start a new thread. The email address not receiving copies this time is Helpkids.org.  The staff responsible for this mail box did ask that this email be whitelisted.

 

Thanks again,

Judi

 

Judith Umbreit

Database Administrator

Fund Development

 

Uplift Family Services (Formerly EMQ FamiliesFirst)

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Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

 

 

 

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Chris Martin

Thanks Judi Umbreit‍. I'm replying to you directly to you with more detailed info. The short version for others who come across this thread is that it looks like each time this has happened, your mail server rejected the gift notification emails that were sent from the Blackbaud mail servers and the rejection type indicated by your mail servers was "permanent failure". That's why those email addresses were blacklisted on our end. Your mail server essentially responded with "don't bother trying to ever send email to this address because it won't ever work".


This is probably happening because of a rule or setting on whatever application or device is filtering your organization's incoming email for spam. When this happens, a reliable way to permanently resolve it for whoever administers your organization's email system is to whitelist the IP addresses of Blackbaud's email servers.


This article indicates what IP addresses you'd want to whitelist: https://docs.blackbaud.com/email-resource-center/faqs/delivery#what-if-the-organization-not-receiving-email-is-my-own-organization


Thanks!

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Chris Martin

Just tying off this thread to confirm that Judi and I were able to resolve this. There was indeed an email address blacklisted and her organization has a good method going forward for making sure that emails from Blackaud aren't hard bounced (and therefore blacklisted).


Thanks!

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Judi Umbreit

Hey Chris,

 

I wish you had also indicated that part of the resolution on Blackbaud’s end is that your support team needs to check both of your servers to make certain an email isn’t blacklisted. So, if this happens again we each know that the first thing for both agencies to do is to compare what our servers are showing. I hope other agencies do not have this issue because this answer has been a very long and frustrating time coming. It has required work arounds on our side to correct short comings on the software side; i.e. being instructed not to have more than three email addresses in the field to receive gift receipt confirmations.

 

Thank you,

 

Judi

 

Judith Umbreit

Database Administrator

Fund Development

 

Uplift Family Services (Formerly EMQ FamiliesFirst)

Check out our new website! www.upliftfs.org

Find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

 

Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

 

 

 

This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message. Any confidentiality or privilege is not waived or lost if this e-mail has been sent to you by mistake.

Chris Martin

We definitely don't expect our customers to understand the details of how our systems store blacklisted email addresses or what process we follow to remove emails that that are valid from the list. We unfortunately didn't follow our internal process very well when you reached out Judi Umbreit‍ and the incorrect info you were given about limiting notifications to three recipients didn't help matters. So we're reinforcing some training internally to make sure we're giving accurate info about what can cause notification emails to not arrive and we're also hardening our process of removing blacklisted email addresses that previously hard-bounced but are no longer being bounced by the receiving mail server. 


Ultimately, we'd like to get to the point where that process is entirely self-service and where you don't have to interact with Blackbaud directly at all to "unblacklist" an email address that's known to be a valid email address. 


Thanks and sorry again for the inconvenience Judi.

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management