GreekTrack uses an email queue to send out your emails over time. The queue contains advanced logic to help protect your emails from being sent to spam. This is done by actively watching your Email Reputation score. Too high of a score and your recipient's mailboxes will begin to route your email to spam or reject it altogether.
What is Email Reputation?
Every email address has an email reputation. Your GreekTrack system uses an email address from which to send all system and your composed email messages. Protecting the email reputation of this email address is of paramount importance.
If an email is set to an email address that does not exist ("bounce"), a report will be made and your reputation score will be negatively affected. For best results, it is ideal to maintain a bounce rate below 2%. Higher bounce rates can impact the delivery of your emails. (source)
Why would my email bounce?
There are many reasons as to why an email would bounce including your member may have typo'd their email address on their profile. But the most common is that the member entered their student email address and some university's policies are to delete the email mailboxes of students that have graduated. So an email address that was previously valid was sent a new email, and now that they've graduated, that email bounces.
How is GreekTrack protecting my Email Reputation?
We take email reputation extremely seriously at GreekTrack to ensure your emails are delivered successfully. To help protect your email reputation we process the email address prior to adding it to the email queue, and then once more right before we send the email.
Evaluating email addresses prior to the email queue
Before we will add an email to the queue, we will conduct various quick checks:
- Is the email address blank? If so, block email attempt and report to email summary page.
- Is the email address not formatted correctly? For example is it missing the "@" symbol or other required formatting. If so, block email attempt and report to email summary page.
- Check the list of previously bounced email addresses. Is it on the list? If so, block email attempt and report to email summary page.
If the email address passes this quick review, it will be added to the email queue in your GreekTrack email system.
Evaluating email addresses prior to email send
Now that your emails have been queued in order, we will process a large number emails every few minutes. During this processing we will calculate your current email reputation score and postpone sending emails if you're nearing the 2% mark. This is the how we process your emails:
- Calculate current email reputation score using a historical database of all emails sent from the GreekTrack system (both system emails and composed emails).
- If the email address recipient has logged in within the past 6 months, immediately send their email. These are validated members where the likelihood of having an email address that bounces is minimal.
- If the email address has bounced previously, block the email send and report to the email summary page. This could be the case where multiple emails to this new recipient were queued and the first email was sent but bounced so the second attempt would be blocked.
- If the email address belongs to a member that hasn't logged in in the past 6 months and isn't on the bounce list, then this is an unverified email address. Recalculate the reputation score assuming this email will bounce. If it still falls below the 2% threshold then send it. If after recalculating the reputation score it reaches the 2% threshold, postpone sending this email for a few minutes to allow other unverified email address sends settle.
In summary, emails to all members who have logged in within the past 6 months will receive their emails relatively immediately. Members who haven't logged in within 6 months will have their emails trickle-sent over a longer period of time, sending a few, waiting to see if any bounce, then sending a few more. Depending on the scope of your email, this could take a few hours to 24 hours.