Delivering Notices By E-mail

You can send overdue, billing, fine, hold request, reminder, and routing notices by e-mail. Most e-mail notices are sent automatically by the Polaris E-mail Manager, and posted by the SQL Server job Notice Processing, the job that processes all notices.

Note:
A separate SQL job, Hold Notice Processing, processes e-mail and text message (SMS) first and second hold notices separately. Designed to run multiple times per day, the job runs every 4 hours from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m by default. See Hold Notice Processing for E-Mail and Text Message Notices.

The To field in an e-mail notice is taken from the e-mail address field in the patron record. You specify the From field, any Reply To address, and any footer with the Notification Options parameter. See Set up notification methods, e-mail options, and export location. When you send e-mail notices, the appropriate queue is cleared, the transaction is posted, and a summary report is sent to the e-mail addresses specified when you set up notification. The summary report is also available from the Report Manager. Select Utilities, Reports and Notices on the Polaris Shortcut Bar to open the Report Manager. In the Report Manager, select Notices, Email, Email_SummaryReport.

Special announcements are free-text e-mail messages, such as for a book sale, that are not part of the automated notification process. You can send special announcements by e-mail manually, using the Polaris E-mail Manager utility. See Send e-mail special announcements.

The default e-mail format is HTML. However, certain e-mail servers send HTML messages in odd format, or insert strange characters in the messages. You can specify plain-text format for specific patrons through an option in the Patron Registration workform - General view. Add general data to a patron record. You can also set plain text as a default setting in new patron records. See Setting Patron Registration Required Fields and Defaults and Setting Express Registration Defaults and Requirements.

Note:
Plain-text e-mail notices have the following limitations:
—Detailed content is displayed in separate lines instead of in one line or one group.
—Combined notices may include some fields that are correctly suppressed in HTML notices.

E-Mail Failure Detection

Before e-mail notices are sent to patrons, an internal test message is sent to the Reply-to e-mail address if available; otherwise, the test message is sent to the From address specified in the Notification options parameter. This message verifies the SMTP connection and notifies the sender application that e-mail processing will run. The reporting server connection is also checked. If the SMTP connection or reporting server connection cannot be verified, the e-mail notices are not generated or sent. Failures are recorded in the PolEmailManager program log file: [server]\PolarisProgramData\[version]\Logs\POLEMAILMANAGER
The notices are not posted, and are re-sent the next time notices are processed.

If an e-mail notice is sent but fails due to a poorly formatted e-mail address, or the recipient server rejected it, the failure is recorded in the notification log and the notice set to print instead. It is then posted with the rest of the printed notices when they are run. These failures are listed in the Email delivery failure report available from the Polaris Shortcut bar. Select Utilities, Reports and Notices on the Polaris Shortcut Bar to open the Report Manager. In the Report Manager, select Notices, Email delivery failure to list any failed e-mail notices. You can filter this report by date and reporting branch.

Note:
This process does not apply to reminder notices. When a reminder e-mail notice fails due to an invalid e-mail address, it is posted and not sent to print.

An e-mail notice may be sent but fail due to reasons other than being poorly formatted or rejected by the recipient mail server. These failures can occur, for example, when a mailbox is busy or temporarily unavailable. In this case, the notice is not posted and is re-sent the next time notices are processed.

Note:
If no patrons receive scheduled e-mail messages, the SMTP server may not be set up properly. For help with SMTP installation, see your Windows server help file.

Automatic E-Mail Report

You can set Polaris to send a report to one or more e-mail addresses after the notices are generated. The report includes the starting and completion date and time, the number of notices of each type that were generated, and the name, barcode, and e-mail address (if any) of each recipient. See Set up notification methods, e-mail options, and export location.