Booking confirmation emails are an important part of School Interviews, so we do everything we can to make sure they are deivered. But what happens when someone enters a bad email address?
Our first line of defense is to check the email as soon as it is entered. We analysed several month's worth of failed deliveries, and found a lot of mistakes in the domain part of the address - things like @hitmail.com, @ickoud.com and @gmal.com. We've built an algorithm to efficiently detect domain typos, and now when someone mistypes one of the major email providers we prompt them to correct it.
Sometimes mistakes happen in the first part of the email address, before the domain. The only way to find these is to try to deliver them, and see what happens. Well-behaved mailservers should report back if a mailbox doesn't exist, and if they do, we show these reports in the parent's log.
But searching through parent logs is not much fun. For events where the confirmation email is really important (like video-conference interviews), we've added a list of all failed emails on the new Parent Emails page (link at the top of the PARENTS page). This makes it easy to contact the parents who we know didn't receive their confirmation.
Sadly some mailservers don't report bad mailboxes, so despite everything some emails just dissapear without a trace.
Once we've successfully delivered an email to a mailserver, we still have to avoid it's spam filter. We have put a lot of effort into making sure our mailserver has the best reputation possible, and we're keen to keep it that way. This means making some hard decisions.
For instance, many schools have asked for a way to resend all confirmation messages the day before an event to remind parents about their meetings. Unfortunately this would do terrible things to our spam reputation:
Instead, we make it easy to send a reminder message from your own email system, which won't impact our deliverabilty. The new Parent Emails page also provides two buttons that copy booked and un-booked paren emails to your clipboard..
Last updated Mon 3 Oct 2022 by School Interviews Support.