Workflow allows you to send email notifications to process participants. The processes you'll be digitizing with Workflow often involve many users at various stages, especially when the process begins. In order to ensure the successful and timely delivery of these emails, please consider the information below and ensure these emails can be delivered in a timely manner.
Sending bulk email from Faculty Success systems
Faculty Success facilitates sending email from their platform through a mail relay system called Postfix. Mail is sent from the application server to the relay and then is queued and sent over SMTP.
Workflow notification emails are sent from notifications@watermarkinsights.com.
By default the "From" sender name is "Faculty Success by Watermark". You can revise this to another name you prefer (e.g., Office of the Provost at [Your University]) through a Work Request, but please note that only one "From" name can be configured per institution.
Delays and other problems with sending many email messages
Faculty Success makes every attempt to deliver mail in a timely manner. Some challenges have arisen as universities move from on-premises email systems to cloud-based ones such as Google or Office365. Cloud-based email providers do not, generally, allow for granular control of inbound mail, and these providers use a process called “tarpitting” to protect their systems and clients from malicious and unwanted mail delivery. Tarpitting delays the acknowledgement of receipt of mail delivery to once every X seconds (our general experience is 10 seconds) after large volumes of mail have been received over Y minutes (our experience is 10 minutes). This limits the amount of mail we can successfully deliver. The tarpitting process is not exclusive to cloud-based email providers. Because of the large quantity of email we send, Faculty Success is challenged by these email providers to protect our reputation by only sending one message at a time. This totals roughly 10,000 messages sent every 24 hours.
What can be done to mitigate the problem?
It is best to engage your university’s technical staff responsible for email administration and email service provider to discuss what can be done. It may be an option for Faculty Success to deliver mail to an on-campus mail server which could then route the mail to the cloud provider. In this case, receipt by the provider from a trusted sender could expedite delivery. It may be possible to provide credentials to Faculty Success to send authenticated emails against the SMTP host at the provider. Additionally, it may be possible to increase the number of concurrent messages sent without damaging Faculty Success’s sender reputation – the number of concurrent messages would need to be validated by the cloud provider.
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Note: Please keep this in mind as you implement Workflow on your campus. To engage in further discussion on this topic, please facilitate the appropriate communication between your campus technical team and your Faculty Success Success Consultant. |
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The Workflow module is available to add to Faculty Success for an additional fee. To learn more about adding it for your institution, please contact your Client Success Manager. |