Broadcast Email Is Unreliable

[doughy]

I agree with your analysis, except if the software that is supposed to initiate the e-mail never initiates said e-mail, then it is very likely that the failure is not being logged. I believe this is what is happening.

I have not kept careful records, but to the best of my recollection whenever the "verification" e-mail is sent the main e-mail is also sent. I think a user reported earlier (Doughy?) some cases where the verification e-mail was sent but the main e-mail was never sent. If this is happening, it is not happening to the same degree as the error that we are discussing.

In the past, it has been common for me to get a verification email, even when the real email is not actually sent. However, this is random as well, or at least it used to be. I'm going to be sending out a ward email later today, so I'll see.

[dmaynes]

In the past, it has been common for me to get a verification email, even when the real email is not actually sent. However, this is random as well, or at least it used to be. I'm going to be sending out a ward email later today, so I'll see.

My e-mail this morning was broadcast on the first attempt, so I am happy. I don't know why this fails intermittently, but the e-mail was as big as ever. There are now 97 subscribers. I don't know if the failure is related to the size of the distribution list, either.

The e-mail from last week was 12,285 characters, 123 lines (longest line was 670 characters).
The e-mail from this week was 11,612 characters, 126 lines (longest line was 661 characters).

There were three members last week with records in transit. They were not present in the directory, but they were present as "non-resident members" in the registration list. Those members had moved and their e-mails bounced back. Those registrations have now been transferred also. I don't know if this is an issue either.

Last week's e-mail had at least one non-ASCII character (probably some special punctuation character that I did not find). This week's e-mail consisted entirely of ASCII characters.

[dainapettit]

I've noticed the email broadcast has been broken for some time. I've been doing them for about 4 years and found that they have been getting less and less reliable as time goes on. Sometimes they go out and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I get a confirmation with all the recipients' email addresses and sometimes I don't. Even if I get a confirmation email that doesn't mean anyone will actually get the email.

Our ward mailing list is currently over 100 users and the system seems to break up the mailing into two separate email groups at that size. The only reason I see this is because I end up with two confirmation messages with the last one being those names starting with 'W' and 'Y', which are probably the second hundred group.

Now I am also a Stake Admin and accidentally sent an email out to the stake (~500 users?) and it worked, but it was not a broadcast, but was a notice of a calendar event and that actually worked. I know because I got about 60 bounced emails from dead accounts! I suspect that one is done differently (a different code path) so that may indicate that the problem is with the email broadcast code path only.

One reason why I don't like retrying a failed email broadcast is because one or two times I had an email broadcast show up 3 days later! I never really know if it has failed. If an email broadcast is urgent then this is frustrating.

BTW, lately I've been grabbing the email address list from the "are you sure you want to do this" confirmation page and sending to that list from my personal account and have never had a problem. This leads me to believe the problem resides on the sender side, thus the originating servers.

My broadcast emails are always small informative things like funeral notices, and missionary calling announcements, probably under 1K of actual text.

Seems like this shouldn't be too hard to track down, especially since my broadcasts haven't succeeded in months! I have a funeral notice that needs to go out in the next day or two so I could test this for someone...anyone...

[AileneRHerrick]

BTW, lately I've been grabbing the email address list from the "are you sure you want to do this" confirmation page and sending to that list from my personal account and have never had a problem. This leads me to believe the problem resides on the sender side, thus the originating servers.

How do you "grab" the list? I've been having the same trouble with sending out broadcasts as well. I've been wanting to use the broadcasts, because people are tired of the vague "For more information, please see the website" for events. Are you typing each email in by hand? I COULD do that... but if there is a more efficient way, that would be better.

[doughy]

Is anyone from the church IT actually looking into this problem? This is source of significant frustration to our ward, and it has obviously been a problem for numerous people. Can anyone from church IT confirm that this problem is being investigated? PLEASE! Who else do I need to call or contact to get someone to look into this?

[aebrown]

Is anyone from the church IT actually looking into this problem? This is source of significant frustration to our ward, and it has obviously been a problem for numerous people. Can anyone from church IT confirm that this problem is being investigated? PLEASE! Who else do I need to call or contact to get someone to look into this?

I can't answer your first questions, but I can answer the last one. This forum is not an official way to give feedback or get responses from the LUWS development team. This is a community site, where most participants and moderators are not Church employees. You can get lots of helpful information here, but it will rarely come from the Church.

However, there is a feedback mechanism built into the local unit web sites. A ward web site administrator can use the Feedback link on the ward site's Administration page to send feedback to the stake web site administrator. The stake web site administrator can then use the Feedback link on the stake site's Administration page to send feedback to the Church. I would recommend that you work through that official channel to get a response.

[zaneclark]

How do you "grab" the list? I've been having the same trouble with sending out broadcasts as well. I've been wanting to use the broadcasts, because people are tired of the vague "For more information, please see the website" for events. Are you typing each email in by hand? I COULD do that... but if there is a more efficient way, that would be better.

I would also like to hear the answer to the question on "grabbing" the list....

[aebrown]

How do you "grab" the list? I've been having the same trouble with sending out broadcasts as well. I've been wanting to use the broadcasts, because people are tired of the vague "For more information, please see the website" for events. Are you typing each email in by hand? I COULD do that... but if there is a more efficient way, that would be better.

Well, one way is on the Preview Message page, you could view the page source from your browser, then copy the collection of e-mail addresses to a text editor and do a bit of manipulation. Just search for "<option" and you will see a bunch of lines that look like:

Code: Select all

<option value="">Smith, Joseph <span class='featureslink'><smithj@ldschurch.org></span>

You can then do three search and replace operations to replace the stuff at the beginning, middle, and end with whatever text you need to in order to paste it into your e-mail program. For example, to prepare the list for pasting into a GMail message, you would replace the first part with ", the middle part with " < and the last part with >, to produce a row like:

Code: Select all

"Smith, Joseph" <smithj@ldschurch.org>, 

There may be a simpler way, but that's one way. If your text editor has macros, you could automate this to make it really easy to repeat each time you want to update the list.

[AileneRHerrick]

Well, one way is on the Preview Message page, you could view the page source from your browser, then copy the collection of e-mail addresses to a text editor and do a bit of manipulation. Just search for "<option" and you will see a bunch of lines that look like:

Code: Select all

<option value="">Smith, Joseph <span class='featureslink'><smithj@ldschurch.org></span>

You can then do three search and replace operations to replace the stuff at the beginning, middle, and end with whatever text you need to in order to paste it into your e-mail program. For example, to prepare the list for pasting into a GMail message, you would replace the first part with ", the middle part with " < and the last part with >, to produce a row like:

Code: Select all

"Smith, Joseph" <smithj@ldschurch.org>, 

There may be a simpler way, but that's one way. If your text editor has macros, you could automate this to make it really easy to repeat each time you want to update the list.

Thanks a bunch! I'll probably be doing it this way for now until the broadcast email is fixed. Just a note to everyone, remember to put the addresses in the BCC field, otherwise you'll give the ward email list to everyone on it!

[dmaynes]

Well, one way is on the Preview Message page, you could view the page source from your browser, then copy the collection of e-mail addresses to a text editor and do a bit of manipulation. Just search for "<option" and you will see a bunch of lines that look like:

Code: Select all

<option value="">Smith, Joseph <span class='featureslink'><smithj@ldschurch.org></span>

You can then do three search and replace operations to replace the stuff at the beginning, middle, and end with whatever text you need to in order to paste it into your e-mail program. For example, to prepare the list for pasting into a GMail message, you would replace the first part with ", the middle part with " < and the last part with >, to produce a row like:

Code: Select all

"Smith, Joseph" <smithj@ldschurch.org>, 

There may be a simpler way, but that's one way. If your text editor has macros, you could automate this to make it really easy to repeat each time you want to update the list.

This is certainly one way, but please all should be aware that you should break the list into two parts. The first part are those e-mails that are public. The second part is the list of e-mails that members have asked to be kept private.

Another way is to grab the e-mail addresses from the registration page.

I have thought about building the two lists, but I am somewhat concerned that SPAM filters would block the e-mail broadcast if I send it to a large list.