Our parents may have noticed that our district’s email notifications are no longer coming from messenger@wdmcs.org and are now coming from a different address (delivery@critsend.com on behalf of no-reply@wdmcs.net)
Why the changes? | What is it doing for us?
When we were sending notices out through messenger@wdmcs.org, we were finding a large number messages were being held as spam or not delivered at all. It turns out that providers like yahoo.com aren’t big fans of having our daily emails and our high-bulk messages coming from the same source, so we’ve had to split up our emails. In addition, we are now sending out Infinite Campus messages through a 3rd party email server, critsend.com. In the end, this helps ensure delivery of our email notifications as critsend helps handle any requirements that the providers request.
Advantages:
* 99.4% delivery rate. We’re now seeing the highest delivery rate that we’ve ever had.
* We now receive automated notifications when emails are either blocked by providers, identified as spam, or even reported as spam. It’s helpful for us to be automatically notified when these situations occur so we can contact providers to begin working on clearing them up.
Disadvantages:
* The delivery is slower. Sending mail through critsend.com takes longer than sending out through our own server. For example, our high school’s daily announcements would normally take 15 to 20 minutes to send to 2,600 users. Sending through critsend.com appears to take closer to an hour. However, in the end, if it takes an hour to make sure that folks actually receive the message – that seems to be worthwhile.
Here’s an overview of the messages that our district has sent out through Infinite Campus Messenger in the last week….
| Date | # emails sent | Filtered | Bounced | Blocked by ISP | Total Blocked | Delivery rate |
| 5-Dec | 7078 | 0 | 21 | 6 | 27 | 99.62% |
| 6-Dec | 10543 | 0 | 54 | 13 | 67 | 99.36% |
| 7-Dec | 8919 | 0 | 29 | 5 | 34 | 99.62% |
| 8-Dec | 174 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100.00% |
| 9-Dec | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| 10-Dec | 13121 | 7 | 41 | 21 | 69 | 99.47% |
| 11-Dec | 7482 | 6 | 17 | 17 | 40 | 99.47% |
| 12-Dec | 13,001 | 11 | 31 | 23 | 65 | 99.50% |
| 13-Dec | 9838 | 16 | 20 | 8 | 44 | 99.55% |
| 14-Dec | 13,272 | 23 | 35 | 14 | 72 | 99.46% |
| 15-Dec | 121 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 99.17% |
| 16-Dec | 932 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 8 | 99.14% |
| 17-Dec | 20,138 | 47 | 42 | 21 | 110 | 99.45% |
| 104,619 | 116 | 292 | 129 | 537 | 99.49% |