It is critical for patrons to be notified in the way they choose, to continue to receive emails notices that worked prior to LX implementation, and for libraries to be able to implement a service that doesn't have such a significant flaw. It is a disservice to ask patrons to create a new email account, or to change their notice method due to this issue that should have been fixed long ago. Libraries continue to be offered this service when this issue has been known for over a year, yet it remains on the someday maybe we'll fix it list.

Another unintended consequence is that if a patron who has an email account that works for everything else, just bounced randomly in LX and thus now blocked forever, they also get removed from our other notification systems (OrangeBoy/Savannah specifically), which we use for marketing e-blasts. OrangeBoy/Savannah looks at the account in Sierra on a weekly basis to confirm the e-mail address has not changed. If the patron's notice bounced, then after a week they will no longer get our other e-mail communications.

Having the ability to unblock a hard bounced email address is critical.

It is unreasonable to ask patrons to create an additional email address simply to receive notifications for their library account, especially if the patron validates the email on file.

It is also unreasonable that library staff do not have the ability to reinstate or mark a hard bounced email as safe.

Customer service is important to all libraries, and implementing a fix for this issue would eliminate a negative conversation for those involved.

Please reconsider!

Communication errors occur frequently, and regaining access to communications quickly is paramount for our patrons.

This is very frustrating for patrons. I hope an unlock feature will be in development sooner than later.

I've seen a lot of people having trouble with this. An unblock feature would be very helpful for both staff and patrons.

This is an important feature for managing our communication with our patrons.

We would also need to see this idea implemented before we adopt LX Starter.

We would need to see this idea implemented before we adopt LX Starter

There needs to be a way to unblock a previous hard bounce once the address is determined to be correct or when issues that caused it to hard bounce have been resolved.

We have random patrons who are receiving their library notices via LX Starter and then suddenly they hard bounce.

Once they have a hard bounce, at least in some cases, we see a message in LX that says “The email address … is invalid because it bounced the last email that was sent to it. Unless you replace this email address with a valid one, this contact cant be emailed.”

E-mail that we send directly to this same patron from the same “from” address (but isn’t a notice going through III) does not bounce. Also, the patron has already put our email address in their safe senders list. Having them put that address in their safe senders/address book/contacts does not seem to mitigate the issue. We don’t want to tell patrons to keep doing this if it doesn’t work.

Is there any remedy besides telling patrons to set up a different email account just for notices and see how that goes? It seems pointless to tell them to put our email address into their safe senders list if it doesn’t fix it. We can’t put their old address/address that already hard bounced back into their account or at least via the LX backend, so they’d have to give us a different address. Their email address IS valid and it's not reasonable to ask them to create yet another email address just for our notices.

Well, that's a horrible situation I wasn't aware of. Thanks so much for posting this! We really need a fix for this. Nothing is more frustrating to patrons than this kind of situation ("you've given us the correct information, possibly more than once, but we can't use it").

An option like this seems essential. If reporting on blocks, bounces, & other delivery outcomes is to truly be actionable in LX Starter, we need to have a way to be able to resolve delivery problems that doesn't put any undesirable demands on our patrons.

Once an email address has Hard Bounced, there is no way to unblock it and continue sending notices by email. We have had an example where a patron's email address Hard Bounced, preventing further notices from being sent to it. We have since confirmed that the email address is valid and can receive email but there is no way for us to unblock the address in LX Starter to try to resume sending email notices to the patron.

We have tried putting in a new email address and then re-adding the email address that previously bounced and LX Starter still blocks this as a Hard Bounced email address.

We would like to see an option to unblock an email address in the event that some technical issue causes a bounce and is later resolved. We don't want to have to tell patrons that they will need to give us a new/different email address in order to receive email.

Thanks for considering this!