problem with outgoing email survey invitations

1,347 views
Skip to first unread message

(Peter MacIsaac)

unread,
Oct 30, 2023, 3:03:49 AM10/30/23
to redcap open
i am having problems with outgoing automated invitations to some clients but not all

when I try to send the survey using compose invitation same problem

all clients received automated invitations for consent so no Idea why not working later  in process

has anyone seen anything like this in the past

thanks

Peter MacIsaac

Peter Macisaac (POP)

unread,
Oct 30, 2023, 3:39:29 AM10/30/23
to redcap open
I contacted our admin and this was his response

Hi Peter,

When you send out emails, what email address are you listing as the sender?

When using the University REDCap, you should only ever send from an @unimelb.edu.au email address -if you specify e.g. pe...@macisaacinformatics.org as the sender, then the message will likely be classified as spam by the receiving email server. Most email servers flag an email as spam/suspicious if the server that is actually sending the email (in this case, the Unimelb server) has a different domain to that of the email Sender field (austin.org.augmail.comoutlook.com, etc).

It's up to the receiving server if they want to send a courtesy message back to the sender saying that the message has been flagged as spam/suspicious, and many don't bother. If you do ever get an automated email reply that mentions error 557, then this is the reason why!

As you are an external user, you will either need to send from xxx email address (assuming she is the owner of the project you are working on), OR from the email of another Unimelb user who has access to the project, OR have a University staff member apply to central IT for a shared study email of form study...@unimelb.edu.au (as per https://unimelb.service-now.com/it?id=sc_cat_item&sys_id=d14e63364f6306447861a90f0310c737&category_id=98df5272db83f4d0f0ca1873449619ad). The shared study email address can be added to either your own REDCap profile or to that of any other relevant REDCap user as a secondary email, at which point it will be available to choose from in the Sender box.

Cheers,

David

David Ormiston-Smith | REDCap technical support 
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences
 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "redcap open" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to redcap_open...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/redcap_open/16f84d03-f14c-4e29-a90a-11a88065cc57n%40googlegroups.com.

Rick Watts

unread,
Oct 30, 2023, 10:28:00 AM10/30/23
to Peter Macisaac (POP), redcap open
Hi, Peter. How are you? it's been a while.
From your initial description I can't tell what your problem is. I would need more information to diagnose the problem properly. However, I can comment on the problems highlighted by your system administrator as we have been experiencing challenges recently. More and more organizations with assertive spam checkers are filtering and blocking email messages, for example:
  • Recently all Microsoft mail systems (Live.com, outlook.com, etc) started blocking messages from our institution. It took a conversation with our Microsoft rep to get it resolved.
  • We have found that some hospitals are blocking REDCap emails, even though we are not blacklisted
  • In many cases messages are blocked "silently" which is a breach of mail protocols.
With regard to sending from an external email address, your admin is correct. However, this is a choice that has been made by the institution. There is a setting in REDCap that allows the "from" address for all "external" senders to be replaced with a local email address. The "reply-to" is left unchanged. Because we have so many external collaborators we have now adopted that configuration. We used to set up internal email addresses for study teams, but that did not solve the problem when study coordinators needed to send survey invitations to their users. If you run large multi-site clinical trials you might want to ask your REDCap admin how coordinators at study sites are supposed to send survey invitations to their participants. These users will likely only have email addresses belonging to the site and not the host institution.

Rick Watts

Team Lead, Research Informatics

rick....@ualberta.ca

Women and Children’s Health Research Institute

University of Alberta

5-083 Edmonton Clinic Health Academy (ECHA)

11405 87 Avenue NW Edmonton, AB T6G 1C9

F:  (780) 248-5616




WCHRI is a partnership between the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services, funded by the generosity of the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation and the Alberta Women’s Health Foundation.


The University of Alberta respectfully acknowledges that we are situated on Treaty 6 territory, traditional lands of First Nations and Métis people.


 



Peter Macisaac (POP)

unread,
Oct 31, 2023, 9:11:23 AM10/31/23
to Rick Watts, redcap open
Rick,

A number of participants were not receiving automated survey invitations, and did so when the sender had a unimelb email address but not when the sender email came from an external domain or gmail

Fortunately one of the investigators had a unimelb.edu.au. address so I can now use her as the sender

Initially I thought we could use a nor...@unimelb.edu.au.  however to do that we would need to register a user with this email address and somehow I sense this will fall over.

As I am not an admin currently I don’t see that options open to admins and the one you suggest sounds very practical.  I will pass it on

Peter







You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "redcap open" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/redcap_open/FqI2N6a2gyE/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to redcap_open...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/redcap_open/CAAh1wLs1ribk%3DYmRBP%3DVb2dTjT8NhJNTO%2Ba0Tb%2BhjPVBZwJDLw%40mail.gmail.com.

Rick Watts

unread,
Oct 31, 2023, 10:18:22 AM10/31/23
to Peter Macisaac (POP), redcap open
Hi Peter. We started having this problem a few years ago and I negotiated the power to create email addresses at my institution because I was reluctant to change a configuration unless i had to. But, in the last few months, this has become more and more of an issue and i don't want to be managing a large number of email addresses for external users that may come and go from the sites. I literally just made that configuration change last week and it seems to be working well.

Rick Watts

Team Lead, Research Informatics

rick....@ualberta.ca

Women and Children’s Health Research Institute

University of Alberta

5-083 Edmonton Clinic Health Academy (ECHA)

11405 87 Avenue NW Edmonton, AB T6G 1C9

F:  (780) 248-5616




WCHRI is a partnership between the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services, funded by the generosity of the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation and the Alberta Women’s Health Foundation.


The University of Alberta respectfully acknowledges that we are situated on Treaty 6 territory, traditional lands of First Nations and Métis people.


 


Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages