The Email Sending Lifecycle
Email seems like such an easy concept, and it's been around for a long time. But when a system sends email in the way that Majestri sends emails on your behalf, there are a few variables. Not everything is in your control, or even ours.
For those interested, this article outlines exactly what happens when you send an email from within Majestri, the understanding of which will go a long way to resolving potential issues that are reported by your members.
Differences to Normal Emailing
Sending an email from within Majestri is very different to the way that you're used to sending both personal and business emails. In your normal day-to-day life, you are probably used to doing all work associated with email from within Gmail or Outlook (or maybe both).
In those situations, when you send an email, it's pretty straightforward. You are the owner of the mailbox, and outbound email is handled directly by the provider of that email facility.
Majestri is different. When you send an email from Majestri, we have the responsibility of sending that email on your behalf, and trying to ensure that you get the replies. The very act of sending it on your behalf makes our emails more susceptible to being marked as spam, as the system is the origin of the email, not the email account trying to solicit replies.
The fundamental truth is that the way we send emails on your behalf, even though legitimate, is exactly how spammers send huge quantities or unsolicited emails. Therefore, it's a constant battle for us to differentiate ourselves as 'wanted' emails when trying to deliver to your intended recipients.
SendGrid
We recognised very early on that the quality of our emailing service had to be top-notch, so we found ourselves a third-party provider who is the real deal. SendGrid is a transactional email provider who is used by all of the serious players when it comes to email volumes. SendGrid's reason for being is to send emails on behalf of large companies, so they operate at a huge scale. At the time of writing, the Majestri system sends roughly 200,000 emails per month, so we wanted only the best - that number will only go up very quickly the more clubs that come on board.
In a later section of this article, we'll talk in more detail about the large part that SendGrid plays in our email communications operation.
Composing your Email
There are many screens in Majestri where you can initiate an email, such as sending to event registrants, groups, teams, individuals, etc. Regardless of who you're sending to, you'll have a screen that looks a little something like this.
Note: The purpose of this article is not to address how to build the content of your email.
You may also notice an alert appear on an emailing screen notifying you in advance of any intended recipients that may have ongoing delivery issues (see below).
For more information on solving these sorts of problems, please visit:
Sending the Email
Once you've finished composing your email and click the Send button, the system goes to work. This section will briefly identity what goes on under the hood.
1. Recipient Extraction
We interrogate the intended recipients of your message and distil things down to a set of unique email addresses to send the message to. This involves all sorts of indirect processing, such as going back to a registration (if sending in the context of an Event) and finding the 'extra' email options on the original registration. Invariably, this process yields more email addresses than we started with, as we ensure that everybody gets a copy of the message who should.
2. Reply Address
We get the question a lot about who receives replies to email addresses. In the first instance, we look at the email address you used to log into the system, and by default, that is the reply address. There's a potential that you have been temporarily assigned a club email address via the system. In this case, you will see a drop-down list on every emailing screen that allows you to choose which email address should receive the replies. To be clear, you will only have this option if you have been assigned a club email address via the system, not when it is the email address stored against you as a user.
3. Physical Emailing
Personally, we loathe the 'group' message, when all recipients are BCC'd (or even CC'd) on a single message. It doesn't look right, and could even be rightly marked as 'spam'.
So we made the decision early on that for each recipient of your message, the Majestri system actually sends a separate email. Each recipient receives their very own copy of the email, addressed only to them.
We build up our super-set of discrete emails ensuring each intended recipient gets one (and only one) copy, and then connect to SendGrid under the hood, using their emailing infrastructure to physically send them.
4. Unsubscribe
There will always be people who do not want to get your emails, hopefully they are old members of your club who have moved on. Rather than have them reply to you and then you adding them to the Do Not Email register, we include a link on the bottom of all emails allowing recipients to Unsubscribe from your mail outs. If they click on the link, they will be taken to an Unsubscribe from our mailing list page to confirm their email address. When they then click on the Unsubscribe button, an entry will be added to your Do Not Email register, saving your committee that effort.
Note: once on the Do Not Email register, they will no longer receive group emails. You may get contacted about not getting emails, remember to check the Do Not Email register first in this case.
5. Delivery Problems
If all went smoothly, everybody received the email and you may receive legitimate replies. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and there may have been people that didn't receive the message.
Our interaction with SendGrid after the fact is what is called asynchronous. We poll their system every half an hour or so to get a complete list of emails that failed to be delivered. We work out which club sent which email that had a problem, and provide you with a complete list for you to manage (and correct if necessary).
To track these issues proactively, or to respond to somebody's claim that they didn't receive an email, please visit our guide on: