Correspondence to NC State Qualtrics Users
Subject: Changes coming to Qualtrics Mailer
Date: December, 15, 2015
NC State Qualtrics users:
This email provides critical information about your Qualtrics account. Please read carefully.
Starting in mid-January 2016, there will be a change to how the Qualtrics mailer works for NC State users. This change will not affect the functionality of the mailer, but it will impact the email address in the “from” line, what is shown in the mailing history, and records of failed and bounced emails.
Currently, the Qualtrics mailer is set up to send all email through NC State’s servers using as the default “from” email address. Beginning in mid-January 2016, emails sent out through the Qualtrics mailer will be sent from Qualtrics directly, and the default email address in the “from” line will be from a Qualtrics domain, (e.g., ). This email address will not be editable.
This change will allow users to better track their email distributions. Currently, Qualtrics can only report whether or not a given email made it to NC State’s servers (which it almost always does) – it cannot see if that email reached the final recipient. As a result, because Qualtrics will be able to track the email all the way to its final destination, when looking in the “email history” you will likely see an increase in the number of emails that reportedly failed or bounced due to bad (i.e., undeliverable) email addresses in your contact list/panel.
Under “Emails” in the Distributions tab of your survey, there are two mail statuses that indicate if an email could not be sent.
# Emails Failed – This is the number of failed emails out of the total distribution. Emails fail if the email address wasn’t properly formatted, such as with a misspelling (e.g., instead of ).
# Emails Bounced – This is the number of emails that were rejected by the recipient server (i.e., Google, Yahoo, NCSU, or another institution). Emails are rejected for a number of reasons: the email address doesn’t exist, the receiving server has a high security firewall, the receiving mailbox is full, the recipient server is offline, etc.
If you are sending out unique individual links for your survey to each email recipient (i.e., you are not using an anonymous, open-access survey link), you can see whether an email to a specific email address was sent, failed, or bounced back by looking at the Distribution History. You can access the history by clicking the down arrow on the right-hand side of the mailing distribution. The distribution history also shows whether a recipient has started or finished the survey.
We’ll be in touch again in early January as a reminder of the upcoming change and to give you an exact date on when it will take place.
For more information on using the Qualtrics Mailer, Qualtrics Support has excellent documentation on its resource site here.
As a reminder, our University-wide Qualtrics license includes 24/7 support from Qualtrics. We encourage you to contact them at or 1-800-340-9194 with any questions you have.
Best,
Nancy Whelchel and Suzanne Crockett
NC State Brand Administrators