Under the Hood of Communications Rock's Communication Engine Like a car engine, Rock's communication tool has a number of different parts or components. Most of them can be found in the Communications screen (Admin Tools > Communications). We'll be talking about many of them in depth throughout this guide, but you can read an overview of all of the parts in the Communications chapter of the Admin Hero Guide. Mediums and Transports Like everything in Rock, the communications features are designed to be extensible for the future. That means the messages of tomorrow won't be limited by the messages of today. The communications engine is based on two types of components: mediums and transports. Let's look at how that works. Mediums Think of mediums as methods of communicating. Today Rock provides an email medium, an SMS medium and a push notification medium. Other mediums could easily be added in the future. These mediums can be written by either the core developers of Rock or by third-party developers. If you don’t like it, change it! Mediums can be configured under: Admin Tools > Settings > Communication Mediums. Transports Transports, on the other hand, can be thought of as the worker bees of the mediums. They do the actual work of getting the messages to their recipients. This is typically where you reach out to a third-party service like Mailgun (for email) or Twilio (for SMS messaging). Settings for the different transports are configured under Admin Tools > Settings > Communication Transports. Some transports let you control how many recipients will be processed at the same time by adjusting the Concurrent Send Workers value. This lets you throttle your communications. High volumes of emails sent in a short period can be a red flag for spam activity. Also, large email bursts can potentially overload servers, possibly impacting Rock's performance. A medium can only use one transport at a time. So, you can't have your email medium set up to use both Mailgun and SendGrid. Because the transport gets attached to the medium, you usually set up transports first. Communications Send Job Usually when you send a communication, it will be sent immediately to a communication queue that gets processed in almost real-time. There is, however, a Rock Job that runs every 30 minutes to look for communications with a pending status. You can view this under: Admin Tools > Settings > Jobs Administration > Send Communications. You don’t need to worry about this job, but we wanted to point it out, so you know more about how communications are sent. Unsubscribing From Emails It's very important that recipients of your emails have a way to unsubscribe from future emails, and that requests to unsubscribe are processed in a timely manner. Failure to do so can have legal implications, including fines of up to $51,744 for each individual email sent. Not to mention, your email reputation (a metric used by ISPs to help determine if your organization's email is spam) will suffer, resulting in a loss of deliverability. To learn more about unsubscribing and what you can do to ensure you remain in compliance and stay off of spam lists, check the Unsubscribing section in the Configuring Email chapter below. Bounced Mail We know you have much to share, so let's make sure you have the opportunity to do that. You have to process bounced mail to keep your email addresses accurate and improve your email reputation. Bounced messages are emails that are returned back to you after you send them because an email address is incorrect or no longer valid. Rock can automate this process if you use an email integration (i.e., Communication Transport) that supports the notification of these messages. Currently, the only core integration that supports bounced mail processing is Mailgun. You can read more on this integration in the Integrations chapter of this manual. Third-party provided solutions may be available for other services.