Give us access to the email "black list" so we know who we cannot contact via onMessage.
Here's a new problem I discovered when a parent complained about not getting emails... so frustrating!
TL;DR... If someone hits spam on a Pushpage email, we can no longer email them via Pushpage, but onMessage tells us we are successfully emailing them.
The whole story...
If a community member hits the spam button on one of our Pushpage emails, she gets added to Blackbaud's "black list." Since the spam button is often close to the delete and archive buttons, this is an easy mistake to make.
Once someone is on the black list, we cannot send her Pushpage emails.
There is no way for us to tell that a person has been added to the black list because she clicked the spam button. From our point of view, the system is emailing her successfully.
We do not have access to the black list. In order for us to know someone has stopped receiving emails, she needs to tell us and we need to contact Blackbaud support and they have to contact an internal Blackbaud support team.
Once we learn a parent is on the black list, she must email unblockme@blackbaud.com and say, "Please remove this email from the blacklist." (Note: This didn't actually work when a parent recently sent a request; Blackbaud is trying to fix this.)
This has been the case since 2016 when Blackbaud switched its email server from Amazon to one in house.
This is going to cause extra work on our end because we'll have to open a support ticket every time a parent says she's not getting emails. Usually we just troubleshoot with her.
I've asked Blackbaud to give us a report of everyone at our school who's on the black list. At this time, they said they cannot. I've asked them to look into it because we must know who cannot get our emails.
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Tenley Peterson
- Sep 22 2016
Related ideas
Hello Troy,
I am definitely sensing your frustration here and can see that is is warranted. We are working on a lot of "plumbing" with regards to emails and communications across all products at Blackbaud. The connection that was broken should never have occurred and we 100% should have caught it before it became a problem. The fact that it happened in a place where it isn't obviously only increased the severity.
I am not sure what the plans are for the blacklist to be fully visible but this request will not go ignored. This idea is for the K12 pushpage specifically but because we are all moving towards one shared email service we are making sure our votes and ideas are considered for the bigger master plan.
Voting is good and it does help us. As far as your specific blacklist, please send us the list if you haven't already and we can hopefully set your mind at ease. We do see these requests and the calls to do better, thank you for taking the time to voice your opinion.
And, now that Blackbaud has fixed their programming screw-up and we can actually see that there are messages "bouncing" due to the "uber-top-secret-burn-before-viewing" Blacklist that Blackbaud doesn't, apparently, want anyone to even know about (much less view), you can always check your Pushpage jobs and see that items bounced; however, that's assuming that Blackbaud hasn't screwed things up further and made some other error that only counts emails that have the letter Q in them or some such.
And, of course, to fix what is an obvious error-of-omission, we have to vote on it...like making the product actually useful is something we need to beg for.
Though, I'm told that we can send them lists of CSV files to check against their internal blacklists; I recommend that we all do this whenever we even suspect that there might be a blacklisted email...and have them check all of the constituents each time we run into this problem.
Perhaps when there's some actual consequence to Blackbaud, they might get their thumbs out and make the product useful.
I just learned about this. It is a major problem for us because we rely on Pushpage for almost all important communications with faculty and parents. A few days ago, I learned that at least 5 of our classroom teachers have not been receiving those mailings. If they spammed a Pushpage, it was certainly inadvertent and there needs to be a simple recourse. As Jim Robb suggested, at the very least we should have received a notification whenever a user was blocked. The user should have been notified as well, along with instructions for canceling the error. At this point, we definitely need a way to access a list of blocked constituents.
I typically have a couple of parents struggling with receiving pushpages at any given time. We go through the whitelist steps and the unblockme email step. Sometimes that helps and sometimes not. One parent went through all the steps and was cleared and receiving pushpages then two weeks went by and she was blocked again. Perhaps an email notification to the School's webmaster contact when a user is initially blocked would be very helpful.
Totally missing being able to see if someone is on the blacklist. We had this feature in BBNC and lost it with the move to onMessage
I am told by my school nurse that there are some communications that are sent via Pushpage that we are required by the department of health to communicate to parents. If there are parents who cannot receive these Pushpage messages because of the "black list," we need to know who they are so we can send flyers home with their children.