Hi,

Would like your input if one of you have the experience using Lime with extensive email invitations and reminders.

Up untill now we used Saas email marketing tool that can handle the load - making sure most of the emails will not be put into spam.

Now, we need to use token links and manage reminders which is more suited to handle within LS itself.
Is the capability of sending tones of mails without being blocked etc.. is only related to the email provider or there are things I can manage within LS to help this process be more successful?

Thanks in advanced

Both. For more details, see:

- manual.limesurvey.org/Email_bounce_tracking_system
- manual.limesurvey.org/Survey_participants#Send_email_invitation
- manual.limesurvey.org/Global_settings#Email_settings (for settings at the global level)

So I have done this on numerous occasions and can tell you how it has gone down for me ...

1) Ensure you clean your email list, this is vital, if you do not then the likelihood of your emails hitting a spam mailbox is so high it is not funny ... We use Sendgrid as the mail service and before we took this step the email "reputation score" was around 60% now after cleaning we can send 100,000's of emails and we only hit around 96%.
2) Either be prepared to sit there for a long time when sending emails due to the send limitations in Limesurvey (5000 a time) I think is what we set ours at and seeing the "There is more emails to send" message constantly or search this forum for the Ajax Mail Pluggin which sends them all at once ... a god send
3) Changed your time out values on your server .. there is nothing worse than getting a "Page timed out" message and having to go through the who thing again because the page timed out on the server
4) Do not include terms such as "Win" "Earn" "Take Part" etc in your subject line .. will start triggering Spam filters like there are no tomorrow
5) Ensure your sending address is valid and can be reached via a reply ..again to reduce the risk of spamming
6) Use HTML format for your emails (Some older systems look for plain text to spot spam)
7) Make sure your survey links to a HTTPS site (http links in emails flag for spam)

Thats all I can think of at the moment, but like I said we send over a million emails a year have a good response rate and a great reputation score .. also using sendgrid (which is so cheap for emailing) we get to see who reports us as spam, who opens the emails and who clicks through on the link

The mailserver handling by LimeSurvey is a bit simple. The timeout/issue handling is not there, cause there is no queue (not easy with php, I know).
BTW: When you have notification emails activated (when someone clicks submit, an email is send) and the SMTP mailserver has a delay/timeout, the respondent cannot finish the survey. Hitting the submitbutton will not succeed, till the email can be transferred to your SMTP-server. There is no fallback or queue. Even skipping is not possible. That is not the main topic, but it shows that the mail handling is not that sophisticated at the moment.

thanks

Thank you very much for the tips!
I will sure use those... especially to shift our survey link to a secure one

thanks I was not familiar with the "notification emails" option , is that something that can be allocated to specific scenarios or just a global setting?

The notification mail can be set for specific surveys.

yohay wrote: …that can be allocated to specific scenarios …

For scenario : you can use expression manager, for example