Email Composer Best Practices

 

Overview

This document outlines best practices for using the Performance Center’s email composer. The email
composer is a powerful tool that facilitates easy and convenient communication with users by way of
distribution lists and templates. Any registered user of the Performance Center can be a member of a
distribution list, whereby hundreds of people can be notified of announcements and events with no
more effort than what is required to create a single email message. Pre-configured templates provide
the structure of common messages and contain tags that are automatically populated to provide basic
details such as dates, times and other such information, depending on the nature of the communication
content.

This document is divided into the following sections:

• Best Practices
• Troubleshooting

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.

1. 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 “[e-mail]” 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.
2. 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. Using this field does not cause significant
   problems with emails getting marked as spam. Note: Avoid special characters like the
   exclamation mark in this field
3. 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. [e-mail]) and email replies will be sent to that
   address.
4. Keep attachment sizes small or use a deeplink instead. These days a rule of thumb is to keep
   attachments to less than 1 MB. However, we have seen that when large numbers of users at
   the same company get an email, even a smaller attachment can cause the emails to be blocked.
   Consider using a deeplink to a document on the Performance Center to avoid this issue.
5. Avoid using more than one exclamation or question mark in email subjects. We have seen
   situations where this will cause an email to be flagged as spam or blocked.

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. Usually they will 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

Lotus Notes 6.x
You should be able to get header information (of an "open" email) by clicking on View > Show > Page
Source. This will show the entire contents of the message, with the headers at the top of the message.

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.