Multiple user emails bouncing with domain does not exist errors

[LSST DESC Collaboration]

Hi,

We just set up a new election and have a list of valid email addresses.  When the ballot was sent out, a number of errors came up, all of the form:

This voter's email address is bouncing: 553 #5.1.8 Domain of sender address <bounces+187611...@sndgrd.opavote.com> does not exist

I inserted xxxx to remove the actual email address involved.

Most of these errors are coming from French institutions, but not all.  Is this just a matter of the specific institution possibly blocking OpaVote emails?

Any suggestions?

Thank you,

Heather Kelly on behalf of LSSTDESC

[Zee Spencer]

Hey Heather,

Thank you for reaching out. During the transition to support Google and Yahoo's new deliverability requirements, we erroneously added a second DMARC policy to the opavote.com domain. We rectified this error yesterday (11/7) at 1PM PT; however it may take up to 24 hours for these DNS changes to propagate.

As of this morning (11/8) at 10AM PT I have updated opavote.com's SPF record to explicitly include our dedicated IP address; rather than solely relying on our mail provider SPF record; which should result in SPF passes.

I deeply apologize for this inconvenience. I'll continue monitoring our deliverability reports from our email vendor.

- Zee

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- Zee, Team OpaVote (Support, Engineering, Treasurer)

[LSST DESC Collaboration]

Hi Zee,

Thank you so much for the explanation and the fix.

A quick follow up question - due to this issue, we "disabled" 9 voters who had their email bounce and then requested "Code Voters" for them instead.  This led us to exceed the 25 voter limit for free elections.  Maybe two questions:  1. I'm assuming even disabled voters still count against us in terms of that voter count.  2. We ended up paying $10 so we could continue with this election and get all the ballots distributed.  This is actually an election involving only 20 voters.  Is there any way to seek a refund for that $10 since our problem was actually due to this DMARC issue?

Ok maybe one more question :) I had originally thought the pricing structure implied that we could pay $20 for 125+125 = 250 voters and that would cover us for all elections, but I am now realizing that the $20 is really covering one election involving 250 voters and if we have another election in the future also with 250 voters, we will have to pay $20 again.  I know - that's still a good deal, I just want to confirm my understanding.

Thank you,

Heather

[Zee Spencer]

Hey Heather,

To answer your first question, we're more than happy to process a refund, since going over the voter limit to navigate our email deliverability issues is an us-problem, not a you-problem. I've issued the refund, and you should see it within 5~10 business days.

To answer your second question, you are correct. Paying $20 for a 250 voter election is for that election only. We currently don't have a way to package up bundles of elections, but we could consider finding a way to do so for organizations with sufficient budgets.

Thank you again for your patience!

- Zee

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opavote-support/6c2e355f-bbb4-44af-b483-94015298df33n%40googlegroups.com.

[LSST DESC Collaboration]

Hi Zee,

Thank you so much!

And yes - if there is a way to bundle elections that would be very useful for us.

Just to give you a little background - we are trying to have a single OpaVote account for our collaboration so that we can use an institutional credit card to pay the fees.  Previously, individual members were creating their own OpaVote accounts to run elections for us and it often fell to early career members to shoulder these costs.  That's really unfair of our collaboration to put that burden on them.  On an institutional level, it is much easier to deal with one-time fees rather than small recurring fees - so for now we're going to take a best guess and see about adding a chunk of funds to our OpaVote account that we can use to fund future OpaVote elections over the next year or so. 

Take care,

Heather

[Zee Spencer]

Hey Heather

This is exceptionally good feedback. Thank you so much!

One of the things we're thinking about once we stick the landing on supporting current operations and completing some deferred maintenance is how to better support our organizational clients. Offering Organization Billing, so that election managers can maintain their own sign ins while paying from the organizations credit card sounds like a great idea.

I've filed it with our other ideas around improving institutional and organizational adoption. Is it ok if we reach out for further conversation when we start designing this feature?

- Zee

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opavote-support/232f757f-1239-42a7-9e83-ecafd0307d22n%40googlegroups.com.

[LSST DESC Collaboration]

Hi Zee,

Totally feel free to reach out!

Take care,

Heather

[Zee Spencer]

Oh! One more thing.

Ana let me know that if you want to share access to OpaVote without sharing an email and password; you can visit the "Accounts" page, and then look for the section labeled "Secret Key and Login Link". Anyone with this link will be automatically logged in as you; and will be able to pay for Elections with the card you have on file; so be careful about how and where you share it.

- Zee

[Zee Spencer]

Hey Heather,

I'm following up to let you know that we have have confirmed that we successfully recovered from our ballot deliverability incident and re-sent ballots to your voters. Thank you so much for your patience.

Please don't hesitate to reach out with further questions or concerns.

- Zee

[Heather Kelly]

HI Zee,

Thank you!

I just wanted to follow up on this:

Ana let me know that if you want to share access to OpaVote without sharing an email and password; you can visit the "Accounts" page, and then look for the section labeled "Secret Key and Login Link". Anyone with this link will be automatically logged in as you; and will be able to pay for Elections with the card you have on file; so be careful about how and where you share it.

In our use case - handling the elections is a rotating responsibility.  Having a single secret key and login link which cannot be updated periodically is not so useful for us.  Over time, too many people would have access to the OpaVote account. If there's a way to regenerate the key periodically, that would be very useful so that only one or two people have access at a time - and then when that job passes to someone else, we can reset the key and effectively limit who has access.

Take care,

Heather

[Zee Spencer]

Thanks Heather,

That makes a lot of sense and is incredibly useful! I've added it to our set of considerations as we explore Multi-Users Organizations with Consolidated Billing

- Zee

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