Prevent Koha Emails Being Marked as Spam
You probably receive email spam and marketing messages regularly. But there is one difference between a spam message and a marketing message: permission. When a patron signs up for a library card, they most likely have opted in through your agreement with the library to receive notifications about their items at the library.
Email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail/outlook, and Gmail have been cracking down on spam for years. Most email providers have come up with standards on their own to crack down on spam and phishing scams. Once an email is marked as spam (generally through marking the email as spam through the inbox), patrons will no longer receive email notifications from your library. For example, when holds are available, a reminder to bring their item back to the library, or even an overdue notice. This blog post explains why this happens and what steps you can take to communicate with patrons on what they need to do next.
Spam Scenario
A patron sees an email come through and they mark it as spam. It could have been a reminder about an item due or a message from the library about a hold ready for pick up. If they have already marked an email from the library as spam, they most likely will not receive any additional notification emails from the library moving forward. Now, the next time they come in, and the hold they requested is no longer available, they are upset they weren’t notified. Whether it was an accidental or intentional marking of spam, the patron is certainly upset they didn’t receive the message.
When an email is marked as spam, the email server that did the sending (which if you're using Amazon's Simple Email Service through ByWater would be Amazon) receives that information, and purposefully does not attempt to send to that email address again. This is done to respect the wishes of the recipient and to keep the spam score for the sending IP down (more about that in a moment), which in most cases is a good thing. However, the servers don't know the difference between the notices that patrons might not find as useful versus the notices patrons want and need to receive. All they know is that the patron said they didn't want the email- which can lead to important notices getting unsent.
An IP's spam score tells receiving servers how trustworthy they are. It's kind of like an email credit score- the worse the score, the less receiving servers (which accept email to deliver to the end users) will trust them. After reaching a threshold, a poor spam score can even make receiving servers reject anything from the sending server. This is for protection- there was a time when spam was sent with many less checks, abusing email servers and stuffing inboxes with unwanted advertisements. It's also for security- a poor spam score means that many things sent from that IP were marked as spam, potentially indicating malicious or phishing emails.
As anti-spam technology got even better, email providers started offering more tools to cut down on spam. Some of these tools look at subject lines, or look for unsubscribe footers for mailing lists and increase the spam score based on those as well.
Other things can also impact spam score, but for our purposes here, we're focusing on just this small segment.
Why does Koha think the message was sent if it wasn't?
There are many reasons why that may happen, including patrons marking notices as spam. What we often see is that the email notifications show as being "sent" in Koha, but not actually sent to the patron. This is because, as far as Koha knows, it did send those emails on to the email service (again, if you're using SES, then that is the place from where emails are actually sent). Koha knows if it successfully handed off that email, but it has no insight into what happens after that, because that's a different server entirely.
If the problem is with the account (the patron's inbox is full, the patron's email account has been suspended/deleted, etc) or if the patron has marked notices from the library as spam, any of those items can cause the notice to not make it to the final destination (the patron's email) but Koha would still show as being "sent".
So you are asking yourself, how can I prevent this from happening?
Examples to include in every notice you send
Adding a message at the bottom of each email will help providers establish that this message is coming from a reputable provider. There are 2 examples below to include in your notices. This document will provide you with some quick tips for customization to notices.
Example 1
If you would like to opt out of non-mandatory email notifications, please visit <library opacurl> to manage your notification preferences.
Contact us at <library phone> if you need assistance or information on your account or notification preferences. For online access: <opac url>
Thank you for your patronage.
Example 2
You are receiving this email because you opted in through your agreement with the library.
For more information on library notifications, please contact us at <phone number>.
You have received this email because you're a valued library patron.
Please contact the library at <library email address> to adjust your email notification preferences.
Email Marketing
Koha has tools to send out notices outside of the normal notice process (such as Advanced Notices and Overdues), however, we do not recommend you use this tool for sending out a mass email to your patrons. For a library to go outside their standard amount of emails sent daily could throw up flags to indicate that this is a spammer. Once this flag has gone up, your library's email address will appear on Blacklists, and then future emails will be refused.
We would recommend looking into email marketing software to do this type of mass email, such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. We can easily retrieve all your patron emails through a report and then you can easily upload the patron emails into the outside email marketing software. Please let us know if you need assistance accessing a list of your patron's emails for this purpose. Here are 2 different reports you can run to retrieve all patron reports.
Report 1: All patron emails
SELECT email, emailpro, B_email
FROM borrowers
Report 2: Patron data with multiple emails and first/last name
SELECT firstname, surname, email, emailpro, B_email
FROM borrowers
Within the tools module, libraries can use the News feature to put a notice on the OPAC for patrons to see.
Other Solutions
Dedicated IPs
An implementation through Amazon Web Services (AWS SES) which we're rolling out fairly slowly to protect the reputation/health of the Dedicated IP pool. This is done by asking our partners to each be mindful of the kind of messages that they send (ie: avoiding mass emailing through Koha/patron emailer) as well as requiring a footer in the emailed notices they do send from Koha. If you'd like to find out if you are able to make use of the dedicated IPs, please open a ticket with our support team!
DMARC/DKIM/SPF
This is a bit more technical, but only slightly!
Imagine Alice wants to send a letter to Bob, but she wants to make sure no one else can send letters to Bob pretending to be her, which would make Bob trust her letters less overall (rough explanation of spam score). She could use a special stamp (DMARC policy) on the envelope to ensure her mail is handled in a certain way.
When Alice hands her mail to her post carrier, the post carrier sees the special stamp and knows immediately to check for Alice’s return address (SPF record) and to compare her signature on the envelope with a secret signature she’s provided the post office (DKIM). If those two elements are present and correct, the post carrier brings the letter to Bob (DMARC checks are complete and email is delivered). If they are not, the mail is given to a predetermined mailbox to follow further instructions given by Alice.
This explanation is a bit simplified, but hopefully illustrates the mechanisms in an accessible way. It's important to remember that if you're using SES to send your notices, then you are asking SES to send messages on your behalf. To do that, SES needs your permission, granted through text records in your sending domain's DNS. The sending domain is the domain that you or your organization owns- circ@library.org is an example of an email user (circ) and the domain it is sending from (library.org). This is a simple procedure that usually only needs communication with whoever manages your organization's DNS.
This does mean that you or your organization must have your own sending domain; other domains that belong to other entities (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, outlook, etc) are not recommended to send notices from for that reason- you can't give SES permission to send on your domain's behalf because you don't own that domain!
Your own SMTP server
Koha is able to also send to your own SMTP server, which can be configured in Koha itself! While using SES through ByWater is convenient, there are some major upsides to using your own SMTP server, if you have one available:
- Strict policies (including DMARC policies) may require more rules, which can make setting up SES much more complicated, if not impossible. Instead of loosening those policies, using your own SMTP server ensures those policies are followed
- It is easier to determine why an email failed because it goes through your SMTP server, not through another system you cannot see into
- Setup is faster! All you need is your SMTP server's information and you can set it up easily (and we're always available to help if you get stuck)
Notes
- It takes a bit of communication with patrons to help them understand what types of notifications they are getting from the library and why they are important; instead of marking the email spam they may want like the suggestion of sending these notices to a less-used email box
- Adding a message about these notifications in the notification is a great way to communicate the "why" behind these notifications
- Koha is not built for email marketing but luckily there are a lot of other great tools out there that are! It's easy to run a report from Koha to gather your patron's emails and upload this into a dedicated marketing tool.
- When it comes to spam, we're here to help! We know this can be a messy issue and we want what you want- to get useful notices into the hands of your patrons!
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