Our new policy this year was to have tickets wait to send until 2 weeks prior to each performance. As we are now having more and more shows each week calls from patrons not seeing their PAH ticket email have increased.
I think I have a theory but wanted to know if others have noticed similar trends.
Is anyone else having a lot of issues with patrons not seeing PAH tickets come in and do you have theories? YES, we do ask them to check their junk, spam, and even search for our boxoffice email address which they should be arriving from. =)
Thanks!
Christina
When we used PAH (we use mobile tickets now), we did seem to see markedly more issues with hotmail accounts. We did not wait to send out tickets, so any large orders (too many tickets or too many events) also had issues sending/being received. I believe other topics here have discussed file size limits for PAH tickets.
In the Knowledge Base there is this:
The email server that is used in the hosting environment (Oracle OCI) has a maximum attachment size of ~20MB. Any attachment at or over 20MB will not be picked up and sent by the email server. It is also possible that a patron's email server will have an attachment size limit that is less than 20MB, so even if it was picked up and sent, it won't be received.
There is no way to expand the sending attachment limitation, and likely no good way to expand the receiving attachment limitation. If these tickets need to be emailed your best bet is to break them up into multiple orders with smaller numbers in each order. The other option would be to print physical tickets for will call or to mail. We have also been cautioned by hosting that while the limit is technically 20MB, it is not advisable to attempt to try and send attachments of that size.
Hi Christina,
Our main issue with PAH tickets also seems to mostly be with Hotmail accounts. I actually have a ticket going about it with Tessitura. We do occasionally have issues with orders that have either different performance dates in the order or packages - those tickets will be sent separately based on when the Eticket release date is.
Christina,
We have this issue but it is almost exclusively with Gmail accounts. We do not wait to sent out PAH tickets typically, but we do wait to do so during our subscription renewal period. Regardless of if we wait or if they get sent just after the order, for Gmail, we have found that our order confirmations will go to people's "Inbox" but the PAH tickets go into a folder called "All Mail". Having people do a search for the email address our PAH tickets come from typically results in them finding them in that folder on the date they were sent.
Now that being said, it also seems to be not the solution for everyone! Research seemed to indicate that it may be an issue with Gmail and IMAP settings if someone accesses Gmail also through things like Outlook or the Iphone mail app, and how Gmail and IMAP handle folders and categories. So it would make sense that a large number of people may be having the issue. But not everyone who accesses Gmail through an IMAP account is having the PAH tickets go into their "All Mail" folder.
We also have all of our Tessitura generated emails bcc'd to a internal email address so that we can confirm that the emails have actually been sent out. This allows us to look up the originals and confirm that the email was sent from our side. The frustrating thing is that if I find our version of their email and just forward it from my own work email, they get it in like 5 seconds right into their inbox!
One of the issues with delay send that we have been concerned about is that if the patron doesn't really know when to look for the incoming email AND it goes into Junk/spam or not their inbox, we feel they are more likely to not see it and have to call the box office. At least if the PAH tickets are supposed to follow the order confirmation within a certain period of time, that can be something for them to look out for and reach out say within 24 hours if they don't see it, hopefully increasing the number of people who end up finding it after a quick search of their email.
Jeff
For us, it seems to be specific to email providers and the specific tools each provider is using to avoid spam and malicious email. Everything changed when we went from using an internal Exchange server to using Microsoft 365 Exchange (via an SMTP relay on our network); some problem providers stopped having problems, others that had never before had a problem stopped working. I think my full-time job could be trying to placate email providers, convincing them that we are not filthy spammers.
Consequently, the list of providers that have trouble receiving our PAH email changes over time. Years gone by, Gmail, Comcast, and everything connected to AT&T were the ones having issues; currently Earthlink is the primary one in distress.
We've had problems in the past (prior org) which I think was due to our DKIM being truncated (it's less painful than it sounds), which we ended up solving. Actually, IT did and I looked on nodding.
Here at STC we had issues with Hotmail delivery of PDF for a long time that I thought might be sender rep, but it has cleared up since we migrated to Hosted Services from Self. Actually, I think that the main issue was solved when we simultaneously moved from gmail to O365. There was a lot of SMTP relay work and again DKIM factored.
These may help.