You're right, you probably wouldn't see any indication. There are so many servers these emails probably go through before they get to the recipients. Filtering could be applied at any step along the way and in the case of spam filtering, it doesn't really get returned to sender. I'm sure there are some filtering implementations out there just drop the emails rather than delivering them to the user's Spam filter.dmaynes wrote:There is no indication of spam filtering (I'm not sure that I would see any).
If the issue is spam filtering, why would the filtering be applied for general broadcasts, but not individual e-mails?
As for being applied to general broadcasts and not individual emails, I personally think the reason is obvious. General broadcasts are being delivered to any number between 5 and 500 email addresses at a time. Any email being delivered to anything over 20 or 25 users I'm sure qualifies it for running through spam detection logic.
This could be yet another reason for a spam filter to flag an email as a problem.dmaynes wrote:So the time on the e-mail server handling the general broadcasts is wrong.
It's definitely a possibility. However, I disagree with it being the "simplest explanation". I think this problem would be the easiest to detect, but that is certainly not the same thing.dmaynes wrote:I'm not getting the e-mail verification messages. I just think the server is dropping the request to send the broadcast, or some software packing/parsing bug is causing the request to not be created. That is the simplest explanation.
The potential problem you describe sounds like it would be a completely located only on the Church's servers, which would far easier to detect than any other proposed email issue that has been suggested thus far. I would think there would be some sort of logging in the Church's systems that would reveal your proposed problem almost instantly. This issue has obviously been dragging on for a long time, and that is why I would think the Church would have found the problem you proposed by now. The Church must have all kinds of logging and network monitoring set up to detect this kind of stuff.
So again, I second the notion that is likely an issue outside of the Church's servers. That is not to say that it is beyond the Church's control. There are many steps the Church could take to lessen the chance of these email broadcasts being flagged as spam. To summarize some of the more likely factors (and the ones the Church could actually do something about), the list would include the following in my opinion:
- Sending a message to a large number of recipients
- Sending from an account different from the sending domain
- Discrepancy in time stamps (I imagine some filtering solutions would see an email with this problem as coming from a bogus email client or intentionally trying to be deceptive).