Email, text message success rates slip slightly 
With the crow of a gamecock, Carolina Alert's periodic test began Thursday afternoon, seeing new technology and more users than in past semesters while encountering familiar bumps in the road.
Only five of 46,585 users registered with the system were unreachable by either text message or email during the test, which began around midday and stretched through the next four hours, according to Cpl. Vinny Bocchino of the USC Division of Law Enforcement and Safety.
What caused those failures is unknown, Bocchino said.
The system sent 73,443 email alerts to users; 70,443 went through successfully.
Though the success rate of the email alert system dropped to 96 percent from last semester's 97.5 percent, the number of email subscribers rose by nearly 12,500 between the two tests.
Bocchino attributed many of the failed attempts to bad data and incorrectly entered email addresses.
But the system had issues sending emails to many users in the School of Medicine. While these users' inboxes initially marked the email alert as spam, measures were quickly taken to ensure the messages would be received, Bocchino said.
"We had to whitelist the emails," Bocchino said. "Some email networks will mark a bulk email as spam, but it will go through if you mark the message as whitelisted. Most of [the inboxes] should have received an email before the test even ended."
The success rate of text alerts dropped slightly, too. This semester 98.1 percent of text messages made it to users' phones, down from 98.4 percent in the spring. The number of text subscribers also increased by 9,153 to 49,984 between the two tests, and many of the unsuccessful attempts were also caused by the same issues facing the email system.
"The reason for a number of the unsuccessful attempts were from incorrect data, for example people entering landline phone numbers, which will not receive text messages," Bocchino said.
Newly installed indoor alarms in residence halls also saw their first round of tests Thursday.
The indoor alarm systems are currently in Harper/Elliott Colleges, Woodrow College, Patterson Hall and DeSaussure College and are the newest additions to the Carolina Alert system.
"We started installing indoor alarms just this summer," Bocchino said. "In an emergency, they would play the same alert as you would hear outside."
The university hopes to put this system in two additional residence halls in the near future and will include the $11,000 system upgrade in every future residence hall fire alarm system update, Bocchino said.
Alerts on Carolina Alert's Twitter and Facebook accounts were issued successfully.