Delivering Email Notices

You can send overdue, billing, fine, hold request, reminder, and routing notices by email.

Most email 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 email and text message (SMS) first and second hold notices separately. Designed to run multiple times per day, the job runs every four hours from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM by default. See Hold Notice Processing for Email and Text Message Notices.

The To field in an email notice is taken from the email 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, email options, and export location. When you send email notices, the appropriate queue is cleared, the transaction is posted, and a summary report is sent to the email addresses specified when you set up notification. The summary report is also available from the report server. Your report server is available at the following address:

https://polaris.library.com/reports

Replace polaris.library.com with the fully-qualified domain name that matches your Polaris server address.

The default email format is HTML. However, certain email servers send HTML messages in an odd format, or insert unknown characters in the messages. You can specify plain-text format for specific patrons through an option in the Patron Registration workform > Preferences section. See Patron Preference Checkboxes. You can also set plain text as a default setting in new patron records. See Register a New Patron.

Email Failure Detection

Before Polaris sends email notices to patrons, an internal test message is sent to the Reply-to email address if available; otherwise, the test message is sent to the From address specified in the Notification options: General setting. This message verifies the SMTP connection and notifies the sender application that email processing will run. It also checks the reporting server connection. If the SMTP connection or reporting server connection can't be verified, Polaris does not send or generate the email notices. 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 Polaris send an email notice but it fails because the email address is incorrect, or because the recipient server rejected it, the system records the failure in the notification log and sets the notice to print instead. Polaris posts the notice with the rest of the printed notices when it runs them. The failures are listed in the Email delivery failure report available from report server. Your report server is available at the following address:

https://polaris.library.com/reports

Replace polaris.library.com with the fully-qualified domain name that matches your Polaris server address.

You can filter this report by date and reporting branch.

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

The system can send an email notice, but it can fail because of reasons other than an incorrect address or a rejection from 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 email messages, the SMTP server may not be set up properly. For help with SMTP installation, see your Windows server help file.

Automatic Email Report

You can set Polaris to send a report to one or more email 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 email address (if any) of each recipient. See Set up notification methods, email options, and export location.