Not so monthly Rapid Rewards Reports
 

Are you guys getting your Rapid Rewards Reports monthly? I signed up a long long time ago. I generally don't delete my emails from Southwest, just for the grins, so I don't think I'm missing any history.

I got the June 2010 report, then nothing until the March 2011 and then did not get an April or May report, but got June, and not the July report (which I would have expected by now).

I wrote to Southwest via the website (forgot the date) to tell them of this problem. On July 15th, I got the standard acknowledgement of the message I sent, including this caveat:
Hah.

Today, July 22nd, I received the second communication stating thatAmazing, it takes at least 45 days just to even route the report of a simple problem (of not getting automatically generated reports) to the right (?) people.

Southwest certainly does have a lot of patience to be appreciative of!

Check your spam folder. They've been published:

January 2011 - January 20
February - February 4
March - March 25
April - April 14
May - May 12
June - June 9
July - July 14

Well, I am a little embarrassed, but more surprised and confused. Something still is going on ...

I normally get my email on a Mac on a [email protected] account. I have it set up to forward all my incoming mail to a [email protected] account as a backup.

I have set my family members' Rapid Rewards accounts to send the monthly reports to my personal [email protected] account, not to their own emails.

I did not find the monthly Rapid Rewards reports in my spam folder on my Mac. I did find most (but not all) of the reports for myself in Gmail, and have copied them back to my Mac. I can't explain how they got to Gmail and not to my Mac. It's likely not a spam issue, anyway though, as I do get at least some of my reports, or at least one, for some family member, each month.

Indeed, I received MY RR report for March and June, but not April, May or July. I did receive the RR report for my wife for those months though.

So ... it appears there is some sort of "optimization" happening at Southwest, so that multiple (individualized) reports don't go to the same account in any given month. Why this would be so, I don't know. Nor could I guess how the system would choose a different person's report to send each month.

I have just reset my "communications preferences" in the various RR account so we will see what happens going forward.

I will, once/if I hear from RR CS, tell them about this experience, and try to determine if there is a way to receive all the monthly RR reports for my family members in one email.

Oh the joys!

Kayrjay, I'm a little confused... It sounds like you have setup your me.com account to forward to a gmail account as some sort of backup scheme, and I assume you're doing that through a program on your MAC, etc. If that's the case, then it seems that the forwarding is working as intended. If so, how is that Southwest's problem?

In your RR account, you can specify multiple addresses for the RR report and other correspondence. Is this what you have done?

Lastly, RR accounts, whether family or no, are completely separate accounts and no functionality exists for WN to combine multiple RR reports into one master report.

Right, I set up MobileMe to forward incoming mail to Gmail. Works fine. That isn't the issue re Southwest. I have all my Rapid Rewards accounts use my [email protected] address (which then gets forwarded to Gmail as well as be visible in my Mac Mail program).

No, I didn't have multiple emails for any given account. I did have the SAME email for multiple RR accounts.

Right, I would suppose so. But, if they all use the same email address, WN could "optimize" by not sending out multiple reports to the same email address. At least this seems to be what's happening, based on what I've seen so far.

In any case, it's really hard to see how some months I got my report, and some months I got a report for a different family member, but never got two reports in the same month!

OK, I see what you're saying now. But this could still be a problem with the me.com email service.

I would setup each RR account to have the monthly RR reports sent to the same *gmail* address. I have a feeling they will all show up. :)

Not sure how it could be the me.com mail service. I got my RR report for some months and a different family member's for other months. And, I get a RR report each month.

So, I'm getting me.com mail from WN ... not sure why me.com would only deliver some of what they're sending. It just seems WN is not sending me everything they should.

Odd, though.

Could it be stuck in me.com's spam filters etc? Maybe Southwest's ad agency is sending via a less-than-trusted IP range or outgoing server, so it's getting a higher probability of spam or hijacked account.

First rule of thumb is to eliminate any 'non standard' hops that email takes, so I'd second the idea to have the Southwest email go straight to gmail.

I appreciate the comments and ideas, guys, but I'm not following your reasoning ...

I don't think so, since I reliably get ONE report from RR each month. The way things work with me.com is that the mail comes to the Apple server and is stored there, and is ALSO forwarded to (in my case) the Gmail account. Believe me, I get plenty of spam in both my Apple and Gmail accounts. And, I think the spam that is separated off by me.com into a spam folder is still forwarded to Gmail (where it might or might not be considered spam).

I understand, but I don't see how this helps any. If the mail is sent to me.com, it will be forwarded to Gmail.

I guess I don't follow your theory here to explain why SOME of the mail that I am missing in Mac Mail (which reads the IMAP mail on me.com) was in Gmail, but not ALL the mail I am missing. That is, I think this whole bit about Gmail is a red herring. I just explained it to say how I recovered some of my RR reports. I don't see that the me.com -> Gmail situation has any effect at all on what is coming into me.com.

Maybe I'm being dense ...

Maybe I'm just being dense, but what is the advantage to the system of using one email address and having it forwarded to another? Why not just use either the me.com or the gmail address alone?

My guess is that when SW sends out the multiple messages all at once, likely with the same subject and header data, your email thinks you've somehow gotten several copies of the same message and sends the "duplicate" copies to your spam.

Well the core thing to recognize is that if it ended up in your Gmail account, SWA did in fact send the Email. So the problem for those Emails, at least, is elsewhere.

[normalone posted something similar as I was writing the portion below]
As an exercise, have somebody send an Email to your Gmail account, with your Gmail address also included as a BCC: address. Notice that Gmail cleverly shows just a single copy of the original Email in your Inbox, and you probably cannot find the other copy in spam, trash, or anywhere else. I can't say what mac/me is doing, but they could be doing something similar and they could have bugs in their algorithm causing the problem you have experienced.

Ah, but perhaps I was not clear. The RR reports were not ALL in my Gmail account! For example, since the beginning of the year ...

• Jan: mine
• Feb: mine
• Mar: mine
• Apr: wife
• May: wife
• June: mine
• July: wife

There was only ONE RR report from WM each month, sometimes me, sometimes my wife. I do not have, for April, May or July, any RR for me, only those for my wife. (It does seem odd, does it not, that the problems started to appear around the time of RR 2.0?)

And I am no longer sure, but I believe I always received the same email in my me.com account. (I may have deleted them in me.com, and thus was confused when I didn't see them, but I had not deleted them from Gmail, so I could recover them from there).


[normalone posted something similar as I was writing the portion below]
As an exercise, have somebody send an Email to your Gmail account, with your Gmail address also included as a BCC: address. Notice that Gmail cleverly shows just a single copy of the original Email in your Inbox, and you probably cannot find the other copy in spam, trash, or anywhere else. I can't say what mac/me is doing, but they could be doing something similar and they could have bugs in their algorithm causing the problem you have experienced.[/QUOTE]

Ok, I did that (from a third account, sent mail to Gmail and BCCd Gmail). As you say, I have one copy of the note.

But I don't see how this shows anything about the situation here. Perhaps you are confused about what me.com is doing. The mail IS being sent to Gmail (and maybe, maybe not, I deleted it separately from me.com).

I guess it seems to me if there were something like what you guys are talking about there would be occasions when there would be none, one or two emails from RR. I never got the RR report for me for some months, and never got one for me and my wife for the same month.

Ok, I've probably taken more of everyone's time than needed. I appreciate all the comments and ideas. We'll see what happens going forward.

Well, it doesn't cost me anything, and it's a backup. If for some reason I lose access to my MacBook and can't easily get into Mac Mail, or the website me.com is down, but mails have been already forwarded to gmail.com, I can still get access.

This might explain it, I suppose, if it were random which of the two emails ... mine or my wife's .. got sidetracked.

Anyway, as i said, probably enough good people's time wasted on all this.

Thanks again.

We have one e-mail account and have had it for years. Our monthly reports have been as follows:

Jan 11 His
Feb 11 His
Mar 11 His
Apr 11 Hers
May 11 Hers
June 11 His
July 11 Hers

I have yet to see a month where we both receive a report. I don't have a clue !!!!!!

Wow .. that's the same pattern as mine. Very hard to explain!