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Silly as it may sound, our event manager received an email response from an angry sales representative.  I forwarded it on to the person he was actually mad at.  I guess the lesson to be learned from that is to make sure that someone is getting emails that are being sent in response to the event manager alerts and reports.

Where Did It Go?

So today was the first day my 48 sales representative reports went out all by themselves.  I was even in a meeting for half of the time and just heard my phone chirp once a minute as I received a copy of each.  I was very pleased that later in the afternoon one of my sales representatives happened to stop into the office.  I asked him if he got his report today, bit was surprised that he had not.  I even checked his phone myself.

So I went to our firewall, Untangle and checked the email traffic and saw that about a dozen were quarantined by it.  So, remember that sending out lots of reports in a row that all have the same text in them looks an awful lot like spam to the untrained, computerized algorithmic eye.  When you set up your email address that your event manager software is going to use, make sure it is set as a safe sender in your firewall!

Who is getting this?

You might have noticed that if you add lots of subscribers to an alert, none of them know about any of the others.  It can be a good thing if you are quietly keeping an eye on someone making sure they act on their report, but sometimes you know other folks are getting it, but knowing who all might also be acting on it can be tricky.

So, a good practice for any multi-recipient emails is to just add a list to the bottom of the email.
It is super easy to do with just a pinch of old time HTML.  You may remember your unordered list tags <UL></UL> and list items <LI></LI>and your nice small text tag <H6></H6>  Just combine them as below:

<H6><UL>
<LI>Recipient 1</LI>
<LI>Recipient 2</LI>
etc.
</UL></H6>

Now when you do it, take out all of the extra line returns before saving it, otherwise it makes the list longer than it needs to be, but for legibility here I used them.  If your staff has trouble with small font, bump them up to an H5 instead.