Our HG Upload Service provides you with immediate knowledge of when your buyer or agent has picked up the report. If you sent a PDF file instead of using HG Services you would not know when, or if the buyer or agent received the report. Also, a PDF file increases your failed mail percentage. Sending an attachment creates more hazards for your email. Virus fears may cause early termination of your email by your recipient when they see that a file is attached. The file size is in megabytes as compared to no attached file at all when using HomeGauge because a link is sent instead. Another problem is that buyers with free email are limited in mail size and amount. If they have a lot of junk mail and you’re sending them this PDF luggage, they may not get it due to their mail limit. To go even further is that some real estate offices use spam/virus filters that consider attachments (like PDF) dangerous and your file may get zapped unintentionally by them. An email letter with a link and password to your report is more friendly and lighter, which eliminates all the problems associated with an attachment like PDF. The HomeGauge Upload Service is designed to increase your report delivery percentage.
The report listing says the email notification was sent but the customers/agent is telling me they did not get the message. Is that possible?
Yes. A small percentage of emails will have problems. This is not reflective of HomeGauge’s mail server. As a matter of fact, The HG Upload Service helps reduce the percentage of failed emails even more (see side bar). The reasons that customers/agents may not get the notification email are listed below in order of likelihood.
- 80% The #1 reason that customers and agents do not get emails is because the wrong email address was entered. Often the inspector mistypes it and even in a few cases the agent or customer does not know their own address correctly. We have even seen the wrong email address on a business card. Be sure to double and triple check - ed@umn.edu looks very close to ed@unm.edu but the university of Minnesota and New Mexico are far apart. Q. I did not receive a return email notification? Why not? Some mail servers do not bounce back a return email notification. This is up to the host that is providing the email service for the wrong address. Instead of notifying you of the wrong email address they just throw them away. The rationale for doing this is to help fight spam. Spammers can use the bounce back message to verify that they do not have a working email address and to take it off the list.
- 12% The email was a victim of spam control. In an effort to block spam, some companies have installed spam filters. People using AOL, Hotmail and others can turn on these spam filters. These filters of course are never completely accurate and often block legitimate emails. Users of Hotmail.com can turn on strict spam control that will reject emails for unknown reasons. People using AOL can reject any email that does not come from someone that is on their buddy list. The worse part is that many people do not know that they have turned this option on or how or where to check it. If this is for an agent that uses company email you might want to ask them to check with their computer department to ask about the spam control. After asking if they have any spam controls turned on and alerting them that the message will be coming from the email address support@homegauge.com, you can then resend the email notifications. The notifications are sent immediately so often you can have them try it right then while still on the phone. Q. Why is the email sent in HomeGauge’s name and not my email? The reason is because the spammers in the world put a false name as the sender. The anti-spam filters used by business such as real estate companies look for which direction the email came. If the email came from a different location than the senders address, they delete the email. HomeGauge eliminates this by identifying itself to the agents or buyers mail server as the originating sender (truthfully so), while your name and company still appears on the letter itself.
- 5% Email account over quota or mailbox full. In this case the email address was likely valid, but the user has left too much email on their server and has reached or exceeded their allowed storage space (storage space varies by service). When this occurs, the user may or may not know this is happening, but will not get any new email until the issue is resolved. This is usually remedied by the account holder deleting old email off their server or by contacting their ISP for assistance. Once this is remedied, a new notification email can be sent to them.
- 3% The customer or agent does actually get the email but deleted the message. They sometimes do this unintentionally. When this happens, the person will often not remember deleting the message or will not want to admit it. Or, they have multiple email addresses and are looking for your report at a different email address of theirs other than the one they gave you. Or, the email landed in their junk mail box and they are looking in their regular mail box (spam controls). Try resending the notifications. The notifications are sent immediately so often you can have them try it right then while still on the phone. If a realty company is not getting your notification emails then likely the spam filter at the agents mail server needs to have support@homegauge.com added to their warm list.
Remember that using HomeGauge report delivery is easy because we send a link. It is not bullet proof but it eliminates all the problems associated with sending a big bulky slow PDF attachment yourself. Your report delivery percentage significantly increases using HomeGauge and we make tracking your report easy!
Q. Does the client or realtor need the email notification to access their report?
If your realtor or client already has an HG username and password from working with you in the past, and you have given permission to view the report to the same HG username, the email notification is only a formality. They can log in at any time at www.homegauge.com to view all their reports.
Q. So what do I do now?
Verify you have entered the email address correctly and that it is the correct email address.
If the email address was wrong, clean it out in the HG software and enter in the correct email address and create a new user name. Then go to the HG website at that report and change the user name to the new one using the "assign" link next to the old user name and resend the email.
If the email address was correct, resend the email notification again to help eliminate the human factor mentioned at problems #3 & #4 above. After checking with the agent or buyer if they did not receive the second attempt then likely they fall into spam control (refer to problem 2). In dealing with problem 2 you should ask the buyer or agent if they have looked for your report in the junk mail box. It could and many times is in the junk mailbox. Tell them to look for an email from support@HomeGauge.com with the inspection address in the subject line. Tell them you will send it again. (this third attempt is to eliminate problem 3 and to give the agent or buyer the opportunity to see the report in their junk email.
If none of this still doesn’t work you can click on their HG user name to see their password and give them the user name and password over the phone.
If you notice that multiple agents from the same office cannot get the email of your report link, then you need to call us with the real estate companies phone number and we will ask them to place HomeGauge in their warm list so to distinguish us from spam.
