I have just broadcast our fortnightly newsletter to all our members, and at the first attempt 40 mins ago it went only to virgin media email users, but not to gmail (I don't know about others), and at the second attempt it was received by neither. But two preview mailings were both received by my gmail account. Please help!
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Perhaps there's a delay in Ning's mail infrastructure to ensure mail going through has no spam related triggers.
Thanks, Amber, hope it's just that! But shouldn't that have affected the previewed mail as well?
Yes, unless the preview mail and the actual mail come from two different mail servers. It could also be a bug in the system. Ning may be able to clarify whether or not it is a platform wide or network specific issue. I just know that some systems have a spam filter in place, so perhaps the mail ended up in a spam folder somewhere.
Thanks. Ning support said that it was a bug. There seemed to be rather a scattergun effect - the first email sent 10.04 (London time UK) was received by my virgin media account straight away, and by one gmail account an hour later, but not at all by the second. The second email sent 10.29 was received by the first gmail account 1.5-2hrs later, and later still by the second gmail account, but not at all by the virgin media account. So I'm hoping most members will have received it by now! Though it is a bit late for some of the account to receive some of the info. ...
Yeah.. It seems this platform has a lot of bugs inside of it. I haven't experienced any mail failures here, but will keep an eye out. Email communication is still widely regarded as key to any social space. Especially online.
I'd try asking if anyone has marked the newsletters as spam. If so, and you aren't getting their feedback as all addresses sent through the Ning platform appear to only be a one way, do not reply address. You'd actually have no way of knowing what members do with the email once they receive it. If enough members mark your newsletters as spam, emails eventually will refuse to send. This is why it's important to be sure members receive wanted email. With Ning it's impossible to know what email is wanted and what isn't, so it's basically a mixed bag of what users want and what they don't. Certain things on Ning are customizable yet others don't appear to be the case.
Needless to say, I hope that you get your bug situation sorted out soon. I'm in a situation where I've got a bug where I can't even sign in to my site due to a feature they implemented on their end. So I two am waiting for something to get resolved. I know the feeling when a critical update has gon astray.
try not to expect many event responses or group invites to be dealt with accordingly by interested participants. I wish I could say otherwise for you but email seems to be the only way members can receive notifications about offers. I have a custom email address based on a domain that I own. So when I first started emailing support@ning.com, it took a day just for their response to show up in my inbox. I do think it is a bug with their mail server. Try not to take it too personally. Allow for some breathing room to fix the issue within an acceptable time limit. That's what i'm doing.
Thanks very much for this, Amber (looks like you posted it 3 weeks ago - sorry, I seem to have missed it!). That sounds terrible not being able to sign into your site! Hope that has been resolved. Back to your spam suggestion - yes, I will ask people not to mark the newsletters as spam. They do have an option to unsubscribe from them, though - ?
We've now had two newsletters (broadcast messages) held up or not delivered at all in the past 3 weeks - it's never happened before. Some newsletters/messages (that I know of) take up to 12 hours to arrive, some do not arrive at all. I think it must be a hyper-active spam-filter, as you suggested. This hypothesis is maybe supported by our experience of first sending out a newsletter in which the links did not work (oof! our fault ...), and that was received immediately. It was only when we resent it with working links that there were these problems with delivery. Ning, presumably this spam-filter has only just been installed - please can you modify its behaviour?
Note we cannot avoid having some links in the newsletters to external websites because that is the only way that images can be displayed in the broadcast message. This is another recent, very unfortunate, development. Images that are stored on the Ning server are no longer displayed - it is only when we store them on an external server that they are visible in the broadcast message. (I imagine this is something to do with their overhaul of the storage system).
Hello!
Thank you for addressing the issue!
As the customer support representative has already explained, the issue with broadcast messages and notifications is well-known, and, unfortunately, there is no fast solution to it. We continue to work on the delivery issue, but, unfortunately, I haven't heard of any time-frames yet.
Best regards,
The NING Team