Send A Message Issues...again:

[tonynocchi]

Mostly just a warning and wondering if anyone is experiencing this as well:

We are probably tracking issues with @aol and @yahoo and this is not the problem I'm having now. In the last week (maybe longer), I have had multiple (at least two, probably more based on the lack of responses I've received) messages sent through LCR that did not reach most if not all of the recipients. These are messages sent to members of the Ward Council followed up with a text which is one of the reasons I know they aren't being received. One of the members of the Ward Council is my wife and I am checking her spam folder and it's definitely not going there. She is receiving some emails so it's not a blanket kick-back. I am receiving confirmation emails that these messages are going out. I am also getting text confirmations from other members that they are receiving some messages but it appears that if one person gets a message, everyone does and if one person doesn't get a message, no one else gets it either.

All of the recipients except one are using Gmail and the one-off is using Hotmail. I am submitting a ticket to the help desk for this and will update when I get a response.

[tonynocchi]

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

[ambldsorg]

One of the members of the Ward Council is my wife and I am checking her spam folder and it's definitely not going there.

This is where it would be extremely useful if LCR were to record and publish in the confirmation email the SMTP acceptance message information returned by the SMTP server when it accepts an email. Then if a message cannot be tracked down, you could at least work with the iSP who accepted the message and ask them where it went.

For example, when I sent an email to someone, Gmail sent back the following response when it accepted the email for delivery:

Code: Select all

250 2.0.0 OK  1740537858 00932257fa632-6ef1ca0384ksl264960c3.93 - gsmtp

If the message ever disappeared, I could contact the sender and have them ask their ISP to look up this information in their records to tell him where the message ended up. If the ISP isn't able to assist then I would suggest to get a new ISP that cares more about delivering legitimate emails than it does about censoring them.

Additionally, RFC 5321 specifically recommends that when a server accepts a message that it is a "serious" matter:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.1
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.2

When ISPs get in the habit of disappearing email, it makes the entire email system unreliable (which is contrary to the stated goal of being a reliable delivery mechanism). ISPs that do so make things worse than the problem they are trying to solve. So too, by the way, does an opaque system like LCR's message confirmation subsystem, so the Church doesn't exactly have a clean house in this regard either.

I am receiving confirmation emails that these messages are going out.

In other words, you are receiving the confirmation email from LCR that includes emails that were explicitly rejected by the server and her (your wife's) address is not on that list?

If it's not on that list, and given that we don't have any other superior information as alluded to above, we can only assume that the message was in fact accepted by her ISP and put into a SPAM folder or disappeared (rare but does happen sometimes). You should start by asking her ISP what happened to an email that was sent to her address at the exact time that it was sent, obviously working on the assumption that the Church did in fact send it. If they say that they have no record of receiving an email at that time, then that would point to a problem somewhere in LCR.

if one person gets a message, everyone does and if one person doesn't get a message, no one else gets it either.

All of the recipients except one are using Gmail and the one-off is using Hotmail.

Are you saying that all of the recipients listed in the LCR message get it or all fail to get it? Or are you saying that of all the recipients listed, a subset of those recipients all succeed or fail together in receiving the message?

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

When you say "fail" in this context you mean that zero of the recipients are able to find the message in any of their folders or any SPAM folder? Or do you mean there's an actual rejection somewhere that indicates failure?

Unfortunately I don't have that option (reply to all) available to me to test so I cannot answer my own curiosity regarding the difference between such messages. Do you receive the same emails that your wife does not? Would you be willing to post headers of an example of each (one with and one without "reply to all") so that we can reason about what differences might be causing trouble in the delivery of the messages? You can obscure sensitive pieces of information if that helps.

I imagine one difference with "reply to all" is that all recipients are listed in either To or Cc headers. Perhaps the number of recipients is a red flag to those Gmail recipients? One would think that a company with as much money and resources as Google should be able to handle any amount of legitimate email, but perhaps they have an agenda. At any rate, this FAQ has some interesting implications:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/ ... nding-mail

It suggests that they may limit the number of recipients in a single email to 500, and while I doubt this is what's happening unless you are sending to the entire Stake, it's a possibility. One way that the Church could get around this is to setup a special return email address and use that as a To recipient when the "reply to all" function is enabled. This special return email address would essentially work like a mailing list (perhaps with a cryptographically secure timestamp embedded in the email address that keeps the use of that address to a short timeframe). Then when a member replies, the response would be directed to this special email address which would behave like a distribution list or traditional mailing list. Yes, I know this kind of feature would require a non-trivial amount of engineering effort.

[ambldsorg]

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

What if you conduct a simple experiment with just 2 recipients, you and your wife, and enable the "reply to all" option? Do either of you get it?

[RobertGagnon]

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

What if you conduct a simple experiment with just 2 recipients, you and your wife, and enable the "reply to all" option? Do either of you get it?

I can confirm. If the Reply to All checkbox is checked, no-one will receive the email BUT I will get a confirmation email that the email was sent.
If the Reply to All is not checked, the email will go out to everyone and I will get the confirmation email.

This has only started being an issue this year (I can't tell when exactly I noticed the problem).

[ambldsorg]

I can confirm. If the Reply to All checkbox is checked, no-one will receive the email BUT I will get a confirmation email that the email was sent.

It sounds like an issue needs to be opened up with Global Services Department:

https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/wi ... Department

I would do it myself but I cannot reproduce it because I don't have access to the "reply to all" checkbox for some reason---must be that my calling doesn't permit it or something, even though I can use other features of LCR including "Send a Message".

[tonynocchi]

One of the members of the Ward Council is my wife and I am checking her spam folder and it's definitely not going there.

This is where it would be extremely useful if LCR were to record and publish in the confirmation email the SMTP acceptance message information returned by the SMTP server when it accepts an email. Then if a message cannot be tracked down, you could at least work with the iSP who accepted the message and ask them where it went.

For example, when I sent an email to someone, Gmail sent back the following response when it accepted the email for delivery:

Code: Select all

250 2.0.0 OK  1740537858 00932257fa632-6ef1ca0384ksl264960c3.93 - gsmtp

If the message ever disappeared, I could contact the sender and have them ask their ISP to look up this information in their records to tell him where the message ended up. If the ISP isn't able to assist then I would suggest to get a new ISP that cares more about delivering legitimate emails than it does about censoring them.

Additionally, RFC 5321 specifically recommends that when a server accepts a message that it is a "serious" matter:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.1
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.2

When ISPs get in the habit of disappearing email, it makes the entire email system unreliable (which is contrary to the stated goal of being a reliable delivery mechanism). ISPs that do so make things worse than the problem they are trying to solve. So too, by the way, does an opaque system like LCR's message confirmation subsystem, so the Church doesn't exactly have a clean house in this regard either.

I am receiving confirmation emails that these messages are going out.

In other words, you are receiving the confirmation email from LCR that includes emails that were explicitly rejected by the server and her (your wife's) address is not on that list?

If it's not on that list, and given that we don't have any other superior information as alluded to above, we can only assume that the message was in fact accepted by her ISP and put into a SPAM folder or disappeared (rare but does happen sometimes). You should start by asking her ISP what happened to an email that was sent to her address at the exact time that it was sent, obviously working on the assumption that the Church did in fact send it. If they say that they have no record of receiving an email at that time, then that would point to a problem somewhere in LCR.

if one person gets a message, everyone does and if one person doesn't get a message, no one else gets it either.

All of the recipients except one are using Gmail and the one-off is using Hotmail.

Are you saying that all of the recipients listed in the LCR message get it or all fail to get it? Or are you saying that of all the recipients listed, a subset of those recipients all succeed or fail together in receiving the message?

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

When you say "fail" in this context you mean that zero of the recipients are able to find the message in any of their folders or any SPAM folder? Or do you mean there's an actual rejection somewhere that indicates failure?

Unfortunately I don't have that option (reply to all) available to me to test so I cannot answer my own curiosity regarding the difference between such messages. Do you receive the same emails that your wife does not? Would you be willing to post headers of an example of each (one with and one without "reply to all") so that we can reason about what differences might be causing trouble in the delivery of the messages? You can obscure sensitive pieces of information if that helps.

I imagine one difference with "reply to all" is that all recipients are listed in either To or Cc headers. Perhaps the number of recipients is a red flag to those Gmail recipients? One would think that a company with as much money and resources as Google should be able to handle any amount of legitimate email, but perhaps they have an agenda. At any rate, this FAQ has some interesting implications:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/ ... nding-mail

It suggests that they may limit the number of recipients in a single email to 500, and while I doubt this is what's happening unless you are sending to the entire Stake, it's a possibility. One way that the Church could get around this is to setup a special return email address and use that as a To recipient when the "reply to all" function is enabled. This special return email address would essentially work like a mailing list (perhaps with a cryptographically secure timestamp embedded in the email address that keeps the use of that address to a short timeframe). Then when a member replies, the response would be directed to this special email address which would behave like a distribution list or traditional mailing list. Yes, I know this kind of feature would require a non-trivial amount of engineering effort.

I opened a ticket and it was a known issue with the reply to all button being checked so they informed me of that and closed my ticket. None of my messages were going out to more than 15 people and since only messages to leaders enable the selection of the reply to all box, even in the stake there's not 500 people you could send to. The only solution is to not select the reply to all which means if we want to have a discussion through email I have to use my personal account and not LCR, which means I'm not managing groups in my personal email on top of everything else.

[tonynocchi]

So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".

What if you conduct a simple experiment with just 2 recipients, you and your wife, and enable the "reply to all" option? Do either of you get it?

I can confirm. If the Reply to All checkbox is checked, no-one will receive the email BUT I will get a confirmation email that the email was sent.
If the Reply to All is not checked, the email will go out to everyone and I will get the confirmation email.

This has only started being an issue this year (I can't tell when exactly I noticed the problem).

Correct, and the help desk said it was a known issue when I submitted a ticket.

[tonynocchi]

So on top of this problem, my wife is the RS President and submitted multiple food orders this week because they are due Sunday for our Bishop's Storehouse. She received only one confirmation email that the bishop had approved one order, but she received no other confirmation emails. Had to go in and check that the others were approved (they were).

I wonder how many hours are being 'wasted' because of LCR issues. In the last week I've been able to discover that there are several emails I have sent over the past couple months (at least) to Bishopric, Ward Council Members, and Auxiliary presidencies that were not received because I like to click the reply to all so we can all see who the email went to and we can all discuss as needed.

[ambldsorg]

None of my messages were going out to more than 15 people and since only messages to leaders enable the selection of the reply to all box, even in the stake there's not 500 people you could send to.

I was just guessing at potential reasons why the "reply to all" would behave differently. 15 recipients is definitely nothing that should trigger any bad behavior by the big email providers.