"I'm Not Getting Any Emails from the Library!", or, Troubleshooting Email Notices for Patrons

Do you occasionally hear from your patrons that they are not receiving their expected emails from the libraries? What advice can you give them?

Be Aware of the Timing
Some very connected and very active patrons may simply pick up their holds before the system has time to notify them. The holds pickup notices are sent out in batches twice a day: at around 6:00 in the morning and at around 3:00 in the afternoon. So if a hold is made available at, say, 10:00 in the morning and the patron notices it in his or her account and picks it up in the early afternoon, they would never get the notices.

Double-check the Address in Their Patron Account
Double-check the email address in the patron's account. Is it entered correctly? There would be no spaces, commas, or semi-colons in an email address. The email address must be entered in the EMAIL field of the patron record or the system can't find it.

If you are entering multiple addresses for a patron, put them in the same EMAIL field (separated by commas, not semi-colons) rather than separate fields.

Is it spelled correctly? When Sympatico and Xplornet were picking service names, ease of spelling for their clients was not their first thought. There are a multitude of plausible misspellings for those ESPs :-)

Ask Them to Whitelist our Auto-Sender, in the Webmail Interface
Some email service providers (ESPs) start blocking the libraries' autosender as if we were spam or junk mail. If the patron uses an email client which downloads the emails (like Outlook or Thunderbird, or the Mail app on an iPad/iPhone), rather than using the ESP's webmail interface, they may not even appear in their junkmail folder.

So what can the patron do? They can enter the email address used by our auto emailer as a Contact or Safe Sender (whichever their ESP calls their personal whitelist). If they do, the ESP is more likely to decide that we're sending real mail, rather than junk. And they should do this in their ESP's webmail interface.

• Aliant: http://webmail.bellaliant.net
• Xplornet: http://www.xplornet.com/webmail
• For Gmail or Hotmail or another web-based service, just use their web interface

Once there, the patron should see an option to add addresses to Contacts, an Address Book, as Safe Senders, or to a whitelist. Get them to add sirsi@gnb.ca and unicorn@gnb.ca

After they have, you can do a test for them. Add a hold to one of the 'This is a test' records in the system (one item ID is 1265180-4001) and trap the hold. Wait to see if the patron receives an email at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon or 6:00 a.m. the next morning.

As a Last Resort, Get the Symphony Admins to Check the Email Log
We (and yes, as it happens, that is the royal We in this case) recently found where the Symphony Linux server keeps a log of the patron emails it has sent recently.

If you've tried everything else and there is a persistent problem for a patron, double-check to see if the system is even trying to send email out to them. Send the email address to Lorraine or Amanda or Dave and ask them to grep the sirsimail.log file for the patron's email address. That will at least let us confirm if the system has sent an outgoing message to that email address in the recent past and, if so, when.

I'm not sure if this is useful, or just going over stuff you already know, but there it is :-)
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