SOAR

Thank you for your patience while we found a permanent solution for the Email List feature of your SOAR website.

We do understand how vital this feature is to the communication of your unit. We also understand that a "webmail" solution while easy would NOT meet your needs. Thus we have been working hard to get you back the features you want.

We found that “mailing list software” (Mailman, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc) was all built using the email standard from a decade ago that allowed the FROM email address to have a different domain name than the delivering email server’s domain name (i.e. the mailing list software).

The recent DMARC (spam fighting technology) policy changes by Yahoo, Google, and AOL has broken that email standard and all such formatted email messages now bounce or become flagged as spam. Note: this issue is being felt by everybody on the Internet with mailing lists, not just SOAR.

This also includes simple “email forwarding” – which ends up having the domain of an original FROM email address that is different from the domain name of the “forwarding” email server.

Initially, we were hoping Yahoo would relax their DMARC policy and we could all go back to normal. That did not happen. Google and AOL have even upped their DMARC policy since Yahoo did. That implies these new policies are here to stay and we need to figure out how to deal with them.

Initially we spent time trying to configure our email list software (Mailman) to get the right configuration to ensure delivery. Your temporary email list configuration we put in place is based on that – stripping out the FROM address. It works – email is delivered – but does not have the same “behavior” as everybody is used to. Reply goes back to everyone instead of to the original sender. In the end, we found the mailing list software that exists today will not work well moving forward.

There is simply no way to have the FROM address include the original sender’s email address anymore unfortunately.

We have written our own simple email list software to get customers back to the “behavior” they are used to while at the same time making sure the email messages are deliverable under the new “rules” Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and eventually others will put in place. This has taken us some time to get right and verify the configuration will work under the new rules. We believe it is important to fix this once and get back to normal vs. trying out different approaches.

The description of how the new Email List feature is contained in the next Announcement.

This new Email List feature has been in customer testing for a little over a week now. The testing has proved the new Email List feature is working in both functionality and delivery. We have also weeded out a number of bugs caused by variations in email client, email provider, and our own functionality. Test customers have also provided valuable feedback that helped steer the "look and feel" and "behavior" you will see in the final version of Email Lists we release. Thank you to those customers that agreed to help us with this !

We are ready to move on to the next stage of testing with the new Email List feature - volume testing. We need to ramp up the usage of the new Email List system to see how it handles under "pressure". SOAR delivers almost 150,000 emails per DAY representing close to 10 GB of email traffic. We want to ramp up usage of the new Email List feature and make sure we can see any volume based issues and address them quickly.

On Wednesday May 28th (around NOON est) a "Convert" button will appear at Admin/Email/Email Lists. This button will let the first 200 customers take advantage of the new Email List feature and help us "volume test" it.

If the testing goes well, we will add another 500 customers to the "volume test" on Monday June 2nd. And then we will convert all customers to the new email list by Monday June 9th.

SOAR Support
support@soarol.com
585-388-0211
M-F 9am-4pm EST