Troubleshooting Email Lesson Reminders

If you have clients and teachers that are not receiving Email Lesson Reminders, you'll need to check the following is correct:

• Their profile has an email address that was captured correctly and not spelled incorrectly or is invalid. 
• The "Enable Lesson Reminders" settings are enabled on the user profile.  You can find the steps for enabling lesson reminders here: Lesson Reminders.

If both of these requirements are met, you can check the "Notification Logs" to find out what went wrong by following the steps below:

1. Click on "Account & Settings".
2. Click on "Notification Logs".

The Notification Logs Table allows you to view system notifications that have been sent to your customers and employees. The "Status" column is the most important when you are troubleshooting email notifications as it indicates the delivery statuses of notifications.

Delivery Statuses

1. Delivered - The recipient’s email server returned a successful delivery response.
2. Sent - The message has been sent to the recipient’s email address, but a response has not been returned yet by their email provider.
3. Dropped - The email was not delivered. This could be due to several reasons, including the following:
   • An Invalid email was captured.
   • A permanent error was returned by the server.
   • The recipient has previously marked a notification as spam.

NOTE: You can hover over the status for more information.

Other Things to Consider

The Cut-Off Time

Lesson reminders are queued and sent at the beginning of each hour, so any lessons that have a starting time in the same hour are sent together at the beginning of the hour.

If your "Lead Time" for reminders is set to 24 hours for example, any lessons scheduled for 2:15 pm, 2:30 pm, and 2:45 pm will all be queued and sent the day prior at 2 pm.

SPF Records

If you’re using your own email address to send notifications through Teachworks you can maximize deliverability by adding an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) text record to your domain.

Adding SPF text records to your domain will prevent sender address spoofing by verifying sender IP addresses. In other words, when you add an SPF record to your domain, you are authorizing an email service provider (like Teachworks), to send emails from your domain. Without an SPF record in place, email services like Gmail and Yahoo are more likely to flag your emails as spam.