Ensuring Automated EvaluateUR Method Email Delivery

The EvaluateUR method relies on students, mentors and administrators receiving automated emails that prompt them through the process. We follow every available best practice to ensure that email servers don't interpret our emails as spam. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, some of these emails can end up incorrectly marked as 'junk mail'. In some cases, our messages may be invisibly deleted by your local email system and never even show up in your 'junk' folder.

Both of these situations can increase the workload of the site administrator because steps will not be completed on time, requiring the site administrator to contact the student-mentor pair that is behind schedule to prompt them to complete a step.

To prevent this from happening, we strongly recommend you work with your institution's IT department to ensure that automated messages from EvaluateUR get through.

Ask your institution's IT department to avoid this problem on your campus

The best way to address the problem is to contact your local IT department and request that they explicitly indicate that email coming from SERC (on behalf of EvaluateUR) should be allowed through. You will want to do this before you start using EvaluateUR with your students and mentors.

More information for your campus IT department

Here is a message you can share with your campus IT organization explaining the issue and how they can help.

Show message for IT departments

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SERC (https://serc.carleton.edu) is an office of Carleton College that runs a variety of grant-funded programs to improve science education. As part of our work we run a large number of email lists that faculty in our programs use to communicate with each other. We also send emails related to accounts faculty sign up for within our system (e.g. to share their professional work). All the emails SERC sends are opt-in communications and related to the non-profit work taking place in these academic projects. All our mail is sent via mailgun's mail service and come from the serc.carleton.edu domain. We send over a million emails each year and have no complaints from our community about our email being 'spammy'. We have never been blocked by RBL services and follow all standard best practices (valid SPF and DKIM, unsubscribe links in all emails, etc...). Despite this we find that many of the faculty we work with find some emails we deliver for them--often communication between colleagues at other institutions about projects they are actively working on -- get incorrectly marked as junk. In some cases email systems are accepting messages from us and then deleting them in ways that are invisible to individual users (i.e. the messages aren't routed to user's Junk folders). This problem is most acute at campuses that use Office365 for institutional email. Since we often work with multiple people at each institution we find it's most effective to have our domain allowlisted for the entire campus, rather than rely on individual faculty members knowing about the problem and knowing how to successfully filtering our address. So we (and the faculty at your institution who work with us) would appreciate your adding our domain (or our mail host mg.serc.carleton.edu) to a campus email allowlist so that our emails don't get incorrectly marked as spam. If you have questions feel free to contact Sean Fox (sfox@carleton.edu).

Encourage students and mentors to use their campus provided email accounts for EvaluateUR

The process described above will only apply to email accounts run by your campus IT organization. Even if you've done this, there may still be issues if students or mentors use non-campus-affiliated email accounts for EvaluateUR communication. Encourage students and mentors to use their campus provided email accounts for EvaluateUR if possible.

If a campus-wide solution is not possible add SERC to the list of senders that shouldn't be marked as spam

Most email systems provide a mechanism where you can indicate specific email sources that should never be considered Junk Mail (Spam). If you add SERC's information to your list, it will greatly reduce the chance that future emails from SERC end up in the Junk folder. The exact details vary depending on what program you read your email through and what email service you (or your institution) uses. Here are some examples for common email environments. Your local institution's tech support folks can also likely help you set this up. The key detail to know is that all SERC email will come from the serc.carleton.edu domain and more specifically the host mg.serc.carleton.edu. In most cases, you can add this address to your email client so that our mail isn't marked as spam.

Microsoft Outlook and Office 365

Add @serc.carleton.edu to your safe senders and safe recipients lists

• Instructions from Microsoft
• Alternate instructions from Northeastern

Gmail

Create a filter for @serc.carleton.edu that prevents it from being marked as spam

• Open the Gmail website from your computer
• In the search box at the top, click the 'sliders' icon on the right that opens the search options.
• In the From field, enter: @serc.carleton.edu
• At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter
• Select Never send it to Spam
• Click Create filter

For Other Email Environments

• A big list for many different email providers