Develop Capacity to Notify Patrons Re: High Number of Items
We just had a situation where a patron had 357 items that were all set to receive a level 3 overdue notice on the same day. The customer had been receiving their library notices, sent via LX Starter, steadily before & after the point where they would have received notification re: these items, but the overdue notification for these 357 items were essentially Thanos snapped.
Delivered as they had been prior to LX Starter, if a patron had a lot of items for one notice job, Sierra would divide the items among multiple notices. We learned from Support that 357 items is too much data for Sierra to pass to LX Starter in one notice & there's nothing currently in place to split them up to a manageable volume.
We don't know what LX Starter's current capacity is, but at the moment we have nearly 120 patrons with 200+ checkouts, so it's very possible that this could happen again &/or may have already happened without our having heard about it.
We'd like LX Starter to be able to handle any volume of notification necessary to meet the expectations of our patrons, whether by sending all items as one notice or by mirroring the legacy functionality & splitting them up over several notices.
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your feedback with us. We understand the importance of being able to send comprehensive emails.
Currently, our email server has a limit of sending emails that are 256KB in size. When emails contain a large number of items the size can quickly exceed this limit. For example, a message with upwards of 350 items can be close to 464KB (depending on other factors like images or videos).
Additionally, many email clients start to clip messages that exceed 102KB. Heavier emails can also take longer to render fully and are at a higher risk of being identified as spam by email clients.
For these reasons we won't be increasing the email size at this time. We appreciate your understanding and thank you for looking for ways to help improve our service
-
Alison Pruntel commented
At the very least, there should be documentation noting the maximum number of items that can be included in an LX Starter notice.