InterNACHI online agreement glitches

You know what we mean by failing to send the agreement. Twisting the words around doesn’t change that.

You/someone could spend some time fixing it instead of posting how great it works (It doesn’t, BTW).

My experience has been it fails 100% of the time. I’ve even included my email in the CC field. Neither I or the Client received the EMAIL WITH THE LINK (There, happy?)

And BTW, WARNING for others! don’t include your email address in the CC field and send. If a crafty client does this (types in your email address instead of theirs), they will see and have access to all agreements where you put your email in the CC email field. ALL OF THEM.

/(Unless that has been fixed, never got a response back on that problem either)

-Carl

Hm. Not sure how I can explain it for you. Let me try it this way. Look at the email going to your client with the link as an optional, unnecessary feature of the system. And pretend in your own mind for minute, that you don’t like the feature because your client or your client’s server blocks it as spam or let’s just pretend you don’t even know about the feature.

The system still functions perfectly.

How? Because the system never actually sends any agreements to anyone and never did. Your agreements sit still. All the feature (you are pretending to not know about for a minute) did was email your client with this link: My Inspection Agreement to sign your agreement. You can just as easily email them yourself (I’m assuming you can email your client directly and it will get through), or put the link on a webpage on your site and direct them to it, or call them with it, or write it on the back of your business card at the inspection and hand it to them.

You often direct clients to your website, correct? You don’t send your entire website to your client, you direct your client to your website. This system simply turns your agreement into a custom webpage for that client. Direct them to it by any means you like. Forget the notification feature even exists.

“…optional, unnecessary feature of the system.”

Is broken.

Can you admit that or we still doing the circle jerk here? :slight_smile:

-Carl

Hi Carl,

I’m sorry that you’re so frustrated by this. Believe me, we are frustrated, too. Email delivery relies on many different servers all working together, often at least 50% of which are not under out control.

In this particular case:

  • A message is dispatched from the web server that our agreement system to a mail server via the SMTP protocol. This we know is working fine.
  • That mail server queues the message for delivery. This we know is working fine.
  • Another mail server retrieves the message from the queue and prepares to deliver. This we know is working fine.
  • That same server connects to anywhere from 1 to 3 (or more) DNS servers to determine what IP address (or range of IP addresses) is/are set to receive email for the email address specified. The DNS servers are not run by us or our email service provider. This we’re fairly certain is working fine, although I’m waiting to hear back from the ops team at our email service provider for confirmation.
  • Once the IP address(es) are determined, the mail server connects and attempts to deliver the mail. This is where we CAN run into one of several issues:

[LIST]

  • The mail server can accept the message, and then queue it for analysis. In this case, it will appear to us that the message has been delivered, but it may get flagged by one of several reasons at the receiving mail server and be discarded. This happens most often when a mail server is using an 3rd-party anti-spam service.
  • The mail server can accept the message and deliver it to the recipient’s spam folder.
  • The mail server can reject the message and return an error.

[/LIST]

We haven’t seen any rejection errors for the two email addresses that you tried to send an agreement to. I’ve asked the ops team at our email service provider to look into that even further. Tim is also adding some special error-checking to your account specifically so that next time you send an agreement (he’ll contact you once the custom code is ready to do a test) we’ll get more insights into what’s going on.

Again, I understand that this is frustrating, and that you want a solution to this very real problem. Just know that we are working hard to debug the issue—it’s not just “hand-waving.”

We’ll continue to look into it an update you once we know more.

Regards,

Carl,

I’ve set up some tracking measures for your account so I can figure out the point where the email is being lost. Can you create an agreement now with my address tim@internachi.org? Let me know (with a separate email) as soon as you do so, so I can track it on all my logs quickly. If you get a chance to do it today, I’ll be around all evening. If not, let’s be in touch Monday.

Tim

Tim, not what Chris wrote:

Nick -

That’s why I’m setting up more tracking measures to watch the emails when he sends them. There are several reasons we wouldn’t receive a rejection notice, and I’m trying to figure out where the email gets lost in this case.

It’s late, but i’ll try one right now.

-Carl

It worked just now.

Thanks,
Carl

I want to try one more thing

Ok, seems to be working at this time.

Thanks,
Carl

Alright - I’m not sure what the problem was the other times you tried it, but it’s probably something related to their email server setup. Let me know (email me) the instant you have a problem again and I’ll look into it. I’ll be storing detailed logs for the present.

Security issue I mentioned with CCing yourself still stands. Just tested it.

-Carl

Carl,

I think we came up with a good solution for that. Check your email and send me your thoughts - I can get that coded first thing next week.

Tim

I had a client who said he sent it twice… and I still hadn’t received it… I asked him if he clicked the "I have carefully read… " button? 5 min later I got the email saying the agreement has been signed

Samuel -

I’ve seen that happen a few times. If the client doesn’t check the box, they see a red box that says there was an error, and tells them what they missed - but some people still don’t read it.

Next week, I’m launching some updates to the Agreement system, so I’ll also change the colors of the “I have carefully read…” box to be more prominent and make the error messages louder.

Tim

I had a client who said he had sent it twice and I told him I still haven’t received it. The next morning he said he sent it again. I told him I still haven’t received it, I asked him if he clicked the "I have carefully read… " button? About three minutes later I got an email… “your agreement has been signed”.

In the time between sign agreement attempts with the client outlined above, I did test the system a few times and one of them failed… It was because I forgot to check that box. Which lead me to ask that question the next day. It may be helpful if that button were a little more highlighted and if there is a rejection by the system the error message was in red and in CAPS?
Hope this helps.

Well posted earlier on my phone… Got home and didn’t see the post so I thought I would give a more detailed account, now I see the abbreviated post from my phone did come thru.

It is funny how stuff gets lost in cyber space, I have received emails that were sent months prior. I have gotten text messages that just popped up out of nowhere that were sent weeks ago. My iPad and phone both alert me when I get email, most times the iPad gets it first sometimes the phone does. It has really perplexed me when the iPad is using the phone for wifi and the iPad still gets the email before the phone. I am sure everyone out there can reflect on this as well.
Think the N… S…a isn’t watching? Bullllllsheeet think again. There is a reason they built that facility out west that can store 100 years of ALL internet traffic, and I think that is where our lost emails are located.

Thanks, sounds great.
Fast response too. I’m new, but I love what Nachi has helped me accomplish so far.
Thanks to everyone
Dave:D

Dave -

I’ve made those changes. Here’s the announcement: