2020-08-10 Meeting - Internet Web Forms Email Issue
Date
Attendees
Agenda/Notes
- Our internet site(s) send email to staff when 12-15 data entry forms are submitted by constituents
- Email is likely sent consistently (via SendGrid who has excellent - not 100% - reliability), but all sent are not 100% received primarily due to various spam mechanisms in place and not under our control
- Options to consider:
- Continue to make email as resilient as possible, while acknowledging the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (how all email is sent) is a simple/non-resilient/non-guaranteed protocol
- SendGrid options (authentication, restricted addresses, etc.) to help ensure delivery
- DTech options to help ensure delivery
- Build a monitoring system to record mail sent (using the SendGrid API?) and ensure mail delivered
- CAPTCHA in front of the forms to limit spam entries and preserve reputation
- Rearchitect the system to use a protocol other than internet email (SMTP) to send messages
- This would take extensive work to get as high reliability as we have now
- This would require custom code which goes against the districts' commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) direction (unless there is no COTS solution for this)
- This would potentially be a joint development effort between Digital Deployment (DD) and IT depending on the final architecture and level of reliability desired
- Use a COTS solution
- Manually check the web forms submissions to make sure nothing was missed
- See if DD can send an automated report of form submissions received which we could reconcile against emails received
- While the delivery of that email (like all email) is not 100% reliable, we would know to expect it (assuming it is sent on a consistent schedule) and staff can manually check submissions only if/when it is not received
- Continue to make email as resilient as possible, while acknowledging the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (how all email is sent) is a simple/non-resilient/non-guaranteed protocol
Other Information
- From SendGrid: "While no one can guarantee email deliverability, with SendGrid you can be confident that you’ll have the tools and the expertise you need to optimize your inbox delivery rate." Note the use of optimize vs. guarantee.
- SMTP internet standard was first defined in 1982 (pretty old as internet standards go)
- Having IT involved in the architecture of the Internet sites would ease this effort
- 100% reliability or even 5 9's (99.999%) (using email or otherwise) will be very expensive (very few, if any, of our systems have that)
- Email between Ryan, Tina, Peter, and Gene: FW FW ITSD-4155 Internet form submitals.msg
Action items
- Peter is going to schedule a follow-up meeting with Jeff, Peter, Nicole, and a technical contact at DD to discuss options.