Our email system uses several different methods to try to deliver your email to your selected recipients, after you click the “Send” button.

As soon as the “Send” button is clicked our email service first filters out all duplicate email addresses. For example if general membership was selected, plus club executives, plus board members, we ensure everyone receives just one email. Once duplicate emails are removed from the recipient list we pass on the recipient list to SendGrid, this is the mail service ClubRunner uses to process the several thousand emails that are sent daily from within our system. The SendGrid mail system attempts delivery to all recipients - one at a time.  In other words if 100 recipients were selected, we don’t cc 100 people (as this increases likelihood of being marked as spam), rather we send 100 emails one at a time. This also assist us in gathering email stats.

Almost all common email systems such as Sendgrid “hand the message off” to the recipient’s email system. For example if we successfully send to a recipient using a Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo/etc. email account - that email gets marked as successfully sent and this information is recorded back to our own system. We cannot see “inside” any user’s email folders as this is a security threat, so this interaction is just like delivering a package. For example if a package is successfully delivered to someone's house (i.e. recipient’s email system), we cannot see inside the house (i.e. if it lands in the recipients inbox or spam folder).

In other words even if the message is marked as “Sent” in ClubRunner, it may still land in the recipient’s spam folder.

If on the other hand our email message is rejected by the recipient’s email system, this is also reported back to our system.  An email can be rejected for many reasons: the email address is spelled incorrectly, the recipient’s email folder is past its storage limit, there was a dropped connection to the network, the recipient has strong security settings which mark our ClubRunner email as spam, plus many more reasons.

When there are issues with sending the email, Sendgrid does not just attempt to send the email once, it may attempt several tries to send that email. An email can re-attempt to send from 2 to as many as 20 times, this depends on what type of bounce/block is occurring on the recipient’s end as well as other factors.

If the message is not able to be “handed off” to the recipient’s email service, or if that email service outright rejects our message, this is recorded in our system as a bounce or a block along with an accompanying error message explaining why it was rejected. This all gets stored in your website’s “Blocked Emails” page.

Sending an email in ClubRunner is not always like sending an email through Gmail/Hotmail/etc. because, in some instances, there could be thousands of recipients and our system needs to keep email stats for each individual recipient. We are also sending to many recipients who may work in financial, legal, and other institutions where their security filters are higher than average.

If you are a website executive or admin, you may explore the “Blocked Emails” feature by clicking here.

If you are a recipient, you can review some of the reasons why you’re not able to receive emails sent through ClubRunner by clicking here.

You can read more about how Sendgrid manages bounced emails by clicking here.

If you have persisting issues or further questions, please contact our support team.