August 6, 2020

We’ve let you down.

We are so very sorry.

On July 25th, we embarked on a significant change to our infrastructure that has been many months in the making to ensure we could provide our WordFly community with a reliable, scalable, and modern email platform. The changes we made were vital and could not be delayed. We’ve had bumps in the past and we could not bear another unforeseen outage. We were very proud and excited to share the new infrastructure with you. We want to be here with you for a very long time.

The move to our new hosting facility and infrastructure required us to acquire new IPs that we now fully own. (Any future relocation will not require new IPs.) Our previous IPs were provided by our former hosting facility and while we made every attempt possible to procure those IPs, it was not possible. These new IPs are defined as having a “neutral reputation” which requires a partnership between the Email Provider (WordFly) and the Sender (you) to ensure a successful warmup process. We had to make a big ask of you and your organization to change your sending calendar to focus on your most engaged subscribers and reduce volume during the warmup process.

It was a lot to ask of you. Especially during this challenging time. 

We are incredibly grateful for your partnership, patience, and honesty.

Fortunately, your huge efforts over the past week have been successful in ensuring positive sender reputations across ISPs. As noted in our previous update, we did need to mitigate and respond to many ISPs as we came back online for them to ensure it was safe to authenticate us as an ESP. While sender reputations are positive, the warmup process is continuing in this second week. 

We’ve learned that we made mistakes in our deliverability guidance to you. We were too optimistic about the volumes that we thought would be allowed for a few ISPs, Google domains in particular.

We are devastated by the idea that we could be adversely impacting our clients during this incredibly challenging environment for arts, culture, and public media. We are deeply sorry.

We have been working continuously to proactively identify opportunities for improvement, respond to requests from ISPs, and monitor our many tools and platforms to mitigate deliverability issues. There has been significant progress and we know many of you are already seeing positive deliverability. For others, it has been more challenging and we are working diligently to get every organization to their full volumes.

From the start, we have had our automated traffic shaping tool, known as Adaptive Delivery, working hard behind the scenes adjusting volume per IP and ISP based on direct communication from the ISP’s servers. While this has led to emails going out slower than we had communicated to you, it has also ensured that we are building strong sender reputations. 

At this point in time, 94% of our IPs have a Sender Score of 90 or greater and none of our IPs fall into the highest risk category of 50 or below. We also have 88% of campaigns with a soft bounce rate below 2% and an additional 10% of campaigns fall in the acceptable range for warming up of 2%-5%.

We have made several new temporary programmatic changes to support the warmup process this week based on feedback directly from ISPs around sending to the most highly engaged subscribers during the first two weeks. We hope to remove these controls as soon as we can. We are actively communicating those updates in the WordFly application, on WordFly Status, and Twitter.

While the metrics are positive, our highest IP reputation priority at this time is with Google domain emails given their significant market share. Google has had strict limits on email volumes since our move to new IPs which has led to long delays in delivery or timeouts. At the same time, Google has classified nearly all of our IPs as “green” – approved for delivery of email. As of August 5th, we are seeing increased volumes across accounts, but we are also still seeing significant throttling. Our traffic-shaping functionality automatically increases sending rates in real time in response to feedback from Google. Please see our full statement on Google domains if you are experiencing any issues.

This is a lot of detail but we hope it provides insight into what we are doing and our deep commitment to our partnership with you. We have also put together FAQs to provide more insight and answers to the top questions.

Talk to us

Join us on August 11 for a Town Hall open to Tessitura members

The WordFly team is deeply passionate about the organizations we work with and feel lucky to call you our customers. We hope we can earn back your trust and valued partnership.

Please call 1-844-359-7570 or email us at support@wordfly.com if you have concerns about your email delivery. We’re here to help through this time, and we’d love to hear from you. 

Thank you again for your patience and support,

The WordFly Team