Checking the Outbox: Viewing and Using the Mass Email Report Log

A quick glance at the options on the Mass Email Notification page makes clear just how many options Sona provides you to contact a specific group or groups of individuals.

Less clear, at least from this page, is what you sent and to whom you sent it to the day before (or week before or even just a minute ago!). For this, you want the Mass Email Notification report. It allows you to view what messages were sent out, when they were, and to whom they were sent.

We’re very used to using email, but notification systems don’t have inboxes, outboxes, etc., in the same way. For email, it’s natural to look for the “sent” folder in the same basic place you’d find the inbox folder or saved folder or even the spam folder.

For Sona, it’s just as easy, but instead of an outbox there’s a report. Once you know it exists and where it is, using it is at least as easy as checking your outbox.

To view the Mass Email Report, select “Generate Reports” from the Tasks Menu. Then scroll down to the Mas Email Section, and click the “On-Screen” button:

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This will take you to an on-screen view of the Bulk Email Usage report log:

• NOTE: The “View Recipients” button (shown above) is only available for Advanced Edition or higher

Clearly, this isn’t your typical outbox. It’s not supposed to be.

The Mass Email Report provides certain information that you wouldn’t see if you were simply checking your outbox or “sent” mail folder. It also provides the same information, but makes more relevant details easier to find. Also, it doesn’t include certain things that would be important if this were an actual email account.

Finally, and very importantly, this information isn’t kept indefinitely:

As indicated in the description above (found at the top of your Mass Email Report Log), the log includes information for at most six months. The View Recipients data (see below) is retained for six weeks.

Just what information the report can provide, and for how long, we can make clearer by briefly looking at the fields (columns) included.

Here are the fields included in your Mass Email Report:

Let’s take these fields one at a time.

Date:

As you may have guessed, the date is the date the email was sent. What may not be as immediately apparent is what this means for emails that are sent with delays. The system allows messages to have an Emailing Delay set at anywhere from a single hour to 72 hours. The time in the “Date” column indicates when the user “sent” the message, but doesn’t include the delay.

For example, suppose you create a message but you change the Emailing Delay selection from “Send Now” to “3 hours”:

In the example above, the 4:00 PM time includes the three hour delay. The log, however, will not. Instead, it will read 1:00 PM (the time at which the user generated the message).

Sender:

This one is important, but not for the reasons you may typically think at first. Once again, the comparison with an email account can be misleading.

First, only administrators can send mass emails using the Mass Email Notification feature. So there shouldn’t be much variety when it comes to senders of this email type.

However, the Mass Email Notification page isn’t the only way to send mass emails. Researchers, for example, have a “Contact Participants” option in the Study Menu dropdown for each study. They can use this to contact all participants in the study or those with a particular status (e.g., No-shows, Awaiting Action, etc.).

This is a form of mass email, so it’s included in the log. The “Sender” field tells you which researcher sent it. These mass emails are also distinguishable by type, as we’ll see shortly.

Emails Sent:

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The “Emails Sent” field tells you how many recipients a mass email was sent to. If your license subscription type is Advanced Edition or above, you can also click on the “View Recipients” button to see a list of the email’s recipients:

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Unlike the rest of the information in the Mass Email Report log, the View Recipients list only remains for six weeks. And, once again, it is available only if your subscription type is Advanced or higher.

If you aren’t sure what your subscription type is, you can always check in System Settings under “License Type”.

Email Type:

We mentioned this earlier in the context of researchers using the “Contact Participants” option. The Mass Email Report includes any user-generated bulk emails, not just those sent using the Mass Email Notifications and page.

If a researcher were to use the “Contact Participants” option for one of their studies, then you’d see something like the image below when checking the Mass Email Report:

If your site uses the prescreen, it’s also worth pointing out that prescreen study invitations constitute another type of email sent, and another example type of email you’ll find on your Mass Email Report log:

IP Address:

The IP address here may not be as useful as it is when using Sona’s IP logs or User Activity Logs, but that’s because, in this case, IP Address is much more limited in scope. It’s still useful information, letting you know the IP address the Sender used.

Email Summary:

The name “Email Summary” definitely gives you a clear idea, but there’s still one part of these summaries worth explaining. This field contains the first thousand characters from the email’s content. If this isn’t enough to contain the entire message, it’s enough to give you more than the gist.

Many of us are used to thinking of emails in terms of email accounts and their interfaces, so it’s natural to think that the Mass Email Notification page should somehow be where you’d find information about outgoing messages. Once you don’t find it, you might just assume it doesn’t exist.

It does. And it exists where (if you really think about it) it should.

Now, armed with that knowledge, you can go ahead and check your “outbox.”