Email is a key function in EdSmart, and the primary way we communicate with parents to advise them of new online forms they need to complete, indeed our email notifications are critical if your school does not have our SMS text notifications enabled.
So it's of course very important to ensure that the emails are being delivered. Unfortunately there are all sorts of ways email delivery can be affected - and we separate these into 'soft' and 'hard' bounces - a bounce being where we experience a problem delivering an email and the recipient's email server 'bounces' the message back to us.
Soft bounces are temporary issues, for example, the recipient's mail server may be offline temporarily, or their mailbox may be full. We don't worry so much about these, our mail system will continue to endeavour to deliver the mesage every so often until either we see a 'success' receipt, or it fails completely.
Hard bounces are distinct problems where the recipient's server tells us there is no way the message can be delivered. The most common reason is a bad email address - the email address does not exist.
Finally there are spam reports, where the recipient's mail server rejects the message because it is considered spam.
In the case of both hard bounces and spam reports you should endeavour to resolve the problem with the recipient. If our mail system records either a hard bounce or a spam rejection it will stop all mail to that email address.
EdSmart gives you a way to keep an eye on these issues via our Email Bounce Log. Click on your user name at the top right, and click Email Bounce Log from the menu.
If we have recorded any hard bounces or spam reports in the last 30 days they will be displayed, with as much details as we know.
Beginning 14 June, 2018, we collect more information from the email provider about the bounce and display a button to reactivate the email address.
To remain compliant with ISPs, our email provider disables sending to email addresses with Hard Bounces or Spam Complaints until they are manually reactivated upon request from the school or parent.
If you wish to have an email address reactivated and cannot do it via the UI, please contact us at help@edsmart.com with the address(es) and we will reactivate them in our email system.