UPDATE 6th February: Emails sent since yesterday evening (~18:00 UTC on 5th February) are now being delivered successfully. 95% of the emails sent over the affected period have now also been sent.
We hope the remaining 5% will be sent, but recommend you check with participants and send reminders if they have not yet received emails.
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We have an ongoing issue that has been affecting the delivery of emails sent from Spidergap since Monday morning (4th February 2019).
In this article, I'll do my best to explain what's happening, what we're doing about it, and actions you may want to take.
Please get in touch if you have any questions, or if there's anything else we can do to help :)
What's happened
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Since yesterday morning, the supplier that we use for processing and sending emails (Mandrill/Mailchimp) has had an ongoing issue with one of their servers.
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It's not clear how many emails are affected, or which ones. Many emails that we know have been successfully delivered are not showing as being delivered in our systems. We know that some emails have not arrived at all, but cannot see how many.
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The communication from Mandrill/Mailchimp has been slow, and at this point they are not clear on when it will be resolved. It's possible that it could be hours, or it could be days. You can review updates from Mandrill's here
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This is by far the biggest and longest incident we've had in over 5 years, and only affects the small percentage of our users that have sent invitations or reminders since yesterday. I'm really sorry if your project has been affected!
What we're doing about it
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Our top priority is to communicate the issue clearly to all affected users, to help you find workarounds where needed, and to answer any questions you have. Please see "Actions you may want to take" below!
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We hope that this issue will be resolved in the next 24 hours, but Mandrill have not yet given an estimate. We will keep you updated as and when we know more.
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As a longer term solution, we are looking into alternative email delivery suppliers. Unfortunately, changing to another supplier is not something we'll be able to do on very short notice for a number of reasons — for example, it takes time to "warm up" a new email server to prevent emails being marked as spam.
Actions you may want to take
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We recommend communicating this issue to your participants. An easy way to get the email addresses of all participants is to export their details to Excel:
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You may want to consider extending deadlines and sending additional reminders once the issue has been resolved.
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If you're keen to move forward in the meantime, it's possible to export the links that participants need to use to (e.g.) provide feedback, and then to share this information outside of Spidergap. This help article explains how
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If you have any further questions or concerns, then we're here to help. You can reply to this message, email support@spidergap.com or use our in-app messenger at any time!