Email Delivery To University Mail Servers (.edu emails)

Do you have any evidence that the messages aren't being delivered? Logs, stats, errors?

Ignoring the possible technical issues.

• Are you sure it isn't as simple as the tutor being busy and choosing to ignore the message?
• Does your site have a extremely simple method for a tutor to reply and say they are busy/not-interested?
• Is there any incentive to encourage tutors to reply when they are not interested?
• Does your site have any reputation tracking to show if a specific tutor tends to ignore messages?
• Have you considered using other technologies to deliver messages or reminders like SMS
• Have you considered integrating with something like facebook so you can notify the tutors somewhere that they visit regularly?
• Have you looked to see if the communication issues are related to a specific domain, or do some tutors not have problems?

I help run a medium-sized university's email servers and did a similar job at another .edu (a large community college). Typically universities have email systems quite comparable to a small ISP or large corporation. Often there's a significant difference between the email service given to students versus that given to employees; ranging from lower quotas for students to completely segregated systems for students. I'm guessing the majority of your tutors are classified as "students" by the university systems.

In other words, there's nothing categorically different about universities' email systems.

We happen to run exim with an appliance/hosted spam filter system in front of our actual mail servers. I know of universities that run Exchange, hosted google, sendmail, postfix, qmail, etc... Often Exchange is limited to employees, but it might also be set up for everybody.

Do you send that confirmation email within seconds of them clicking a button that told them an email was coming? They probably looked for it immediately.

Do you have any kind of consistent sender or subject tag? Can a potential tutor that hasn't checked their email in a week quickly notice your email from out of a list of hundreds?

Is any of this during summer? We go from roughly 8000 students regularly (at least every 2 weeks) checking their campus email accounts to under 1000 during the months of June and July (first week of August, too). Basically students check their campus accounts for messages from professors and information related to signing up for classes, otherwise they ignore them and use that yahoo or gmail account they had from back in high school that all their friends know.

EDIT: Also, many students set up their email to forward to another account, meaning you have to get through two sets of spam filters and the second spam filter will be looking at both you and the university. And the university probably has problems with zombied systems in their dorms and on their wireless leaving them with a poor reputation.

I think I finally figured out what was wrong. My outgoing messages were HTML but the HTML was not standards compliant (it was just like a plain text but with some BR tags in it, no headers, etc) and there was no accompanying plain text part of the message.

I switched to just sending out plain text emails, and deliverability seems to be improving dramatically. Still a little too early to tell for sure but I'm starting to get a strong feeling that was it.

This is obvious in hindsight, but it was rarely talked about in any of the things I read so I didn't think to check. Apparently: * plain text is the most reliable if you really need to get through spam filters * if you're going to send HTML, make sure it's standards compliant and that there is an accompanying plain text part to the message as well

Can anyone else confirm/deny this about mal-formed html messages and plain text?

I suspect that the major problem is spam filtering: the emails are being flagged as spam, and delivered to a "spam" folder, where the tutor is less likely to see the emails.

I suggest you follow up with one or more of the tutors, and send test messages from a Hotmail account or something to see what is really going on.

If I am correct, I don't know how you can fix it. You may end up having to require the tutors to use Gmail for receiving tutoring messages.

It would be odd for servers at a University to delete spam. There is that whole academic freedom thing and no one I know of would stand for anything other than simply tagging of it. Therefore, if it isn't bouncing back to you, it should be in the recipient's mail folder somewhere - unless the end user has their client filter configured to delete the spam rather than file it in junk.

spamassassin is commonly used, and it does have tags for HTML only, and bad formatted headers, etc. See: http://www.clickz.com/3565791

You also have to battle the human factor. Many students I know of are very lazy or non-committal. Did you do something to entice them to sign up? Maybe they took the free cake and are not coming back? Getting them to respond to email if there isn't certainty of reward in it for them might be unreliable.

Another possibility you have to consider is whether your server was ever used for unsolicited email. When you recruited these tutors, was it via spam? Perhaps at that point there was a complaint. If so, the hand tweaked local spamassassin rules may have added your domain or IP to a "do not call" type of list.

I've checked my last month of logs and I don't see any traffic from your IP at our University's mail servers. Maybe you should recruit tutors from Acadia University and improve your chances!