This document outlines best practices for using the Performance Center’s email composer.
Overview
The email composer is a powerful tool that facilitates easy and convenient communication with users by using distribution lists and templates. Using the email composer allows you to create distribution lists based on multiple criteria such as organization, system role, or job role. Because the system will always use the latest data for the users who fit that criteria, the list of recipients will always be current.
Best Practices
We have collected the following best practices to ensure emails get through to all of your clients. In addition, the Performance Center has many built in features to reduce your risk of emails being blocked by client servers. For example, when an email is sent to a group of users, each email is sent individually to each user.
- Always leave the default From Address in place. The default address is the address defined in the campus/center properties. When you use your own address (or a company distribution address not at logicbay.com), the user’s mail servers can tell that the email did not originate at the domain of the email address. As a result, sometimes those emails are filtered. For example, if you enter “bsmith@smithscenter.com” as your email address and are sending it to others at smithscenter.com, the servers at smithscenter.com will see that the emails are really coming from outside their systems. At this point they will often either flag it as spam or block it entirely.
- Use the "From Name:" field to customize the name that appears in the inbox. For example, "Service Training Staff" could be put in this field. Note: Avoid special characters like the exclamation mark in this field
- Use the "Reply to" field to enter in an alternate address than the center default. This will ensure that replies go to the desired address. For example, you could use your own address or a distribution address (e.g. trainingstaff@smithscenter.com) and email replies will be sent to the "reply to" address.
- Keep attachment sizes small or use a deeplink instead. These days a rule of thumb is to keepattachments to less than 10 MB. Consider using a deeplink to a document on the Performance Center to avoid this issue.
- Avoid Phishing Phrases and Trigger Words. If you google "spam trigger words" you will find a number of lists of common words that trigger an email to be marked as spam. Examples are
- Free gift
- Fantastic deal
- Don't delete!
- Act now! Don’t hesitate!
Troubleshooting
If you are using all of the above best practices and a user is still reporting that they don’t receive emails from the Performance Center, you can contact the IT group at the user’s location to request @logicbay.com be added to their whitelist. They may need a sample copy of the full headers from the email to investigate. To get the full headers, send yourself a copy of the email that they are not receiving first. Then use the following guidelines to retrieve the header information from the email.
Retrieving Full Headers from emails
Outlook
In Outlook you can find the full headers by right clicking on the email in your inbox and going to
"Message Options." The full headers are called "Internet Headers" and can be copied into a file.
Gmail
In Gmail you can find the full headers by opening the email and going to the more options dropdown (next to the reply icon in the upper right corner of the email.) Choose "Show Original" and it will open up the email with full headers in a new window. You can then copy the information from there into a file.
If your email client is not listed above you can ask your local IT for help in retrieving the headers of your sample email or you can try a google search for instructions specific to your email client.