LCR “Send a Message” application NOT sending to yahoo.com accounts

[ambldsorg]

Just from watching the messages, it seems like the issues are ward specific. I'm suspecting that someone on the domain flagged the emails as spam and now all the email from that ward (or perhaps from that individual sender) are flagged as spam for everyone on that email domain.

I believe that the issues are specific to individual wards only in the sense that individuals are organized in wards and so each ward will have it's own unique set of individuals who are unable to receive said emails. I don't believe that ISPs are blocking things because of a "ward". There is no way for an ISP to identify a "ward" or even individuals in a "ward" using just their email address. In fact, the ISP never actually sees the email address of the person who sends the email, at least not during any SMTP transaction. The SMTP envelope from generally has the form of:

<0100019286aa-bb3c-622884ec-4153-b775-af29-daf50de14955-000000@amazonses.com>

And the From header generally looks like:

Firstname Lastname <noreply-lcr@mail.churchofjesuschrist.org>

The actual email address of the member who is using LCR to send a message is included in a Reply-to header.

So the things that could potentially be blocked by an ISP are:

1) the SMTP envelope from address, or

2) if they do in-depth content scanning they may block the email based upon the fact that <noreply-lcr@mail.churchofjesuschrist.org> exists in the message headers. If they did that, however, that would block it for everyone (which doesn't seem to fit the "ward specific" hypothesis). Similarly, the ISP could block based upon the presence of @amazonses.com in the envelope from. But this too would have the effect of blocking it for everyone.

3) An ISP could also potentially scan a message for the Reply-to header and block based upon those contents, but that would then just mean that this one particular sender would be unable to use LCR to send things.

4) There is another option as to what could be blocked... the sending server's IP or network. For example, in a recent communication sent out via LCR I see IP address 54.240.9.156 which is a9-156.smtp-out.amazonses.com. If an ISP decided to block Amazon networks from delivering emails, that would impact more than just the Church, it would also impact other companies who use Amazon for delivering emails.

It seems that the Church LCR system no longer sends out emails directly using it's own IPs as it once did. Perhaps because they think Amazon will have a more reliable mechanism for delivering emails.

There may be a combination of all four happening in the wild, however, I don't think many of these are what is causing the majority of the problems.

As I've said elsewhere, I believe that there is a blacklist of some kind that is the source of the problem, and certain members of different wards somehow end up on this list. Whether the Church maintains this list and filters out those recipients when submitting to Amazon, or whether it is Amazon who is maintaining the blacklist, the effect is the same. Those members who are on it are unable to receive emails from LCR, even though their email addresses work fine everywhere else. I susepct the blacklist is internal to the Church because this problem has existed long before they started delegating delivery of emails to Amazon. So it makes it look like problems are "ward specific" but that's only because there is a random distribution of the blocking throughout the wards in the Church.

[russellhltn]

The recipients below were rejected by the server. Please verify their email addresses.

I believe that indicates at some point in time, your mail server rejected a church email. When that happens, the church isn't going to keep sending to an address it's been told is invalid. That's one of the things that can get it labeled as a spammer.

As for how to correct this, you might check in the settings for church account as well as in the Ward Directory and Map to see if there's an option to confirm your address.

[ambldsorg]

When that happens, the church isn't going to keep sending to an address it's been told is invalid.

In otherwords, if what you say is correct, my suspicions are also correct. At some point in time it's possible that a delivery was rejected and that the LCR system put my email address on an internal blacklist.

However, there are numerous reasons for which an email might be rejected that do not connotate that the recipient doesn't want to receive emails or that the email address isn't legitimate or valid. For example, if a member, using LCR, sends a message that is 100MB and "the server" rejects the message as being too large, does that mean that LCR should add the email address to the blacklist?

I'll see if "validating" the email address works. In the past it hasn't, but maybe things have improved.

[ambldsorg]

As for how to correct this, you might check in the settings for church account as well as in the Ward Directory and Map to see if there's an option to confirm your address.

I can see no option to "confirm your address". Everything looks fine. There are no red symbols indicating that a problem exists or needs correcting. I see no button anywhere that says "Re-verify email address". So how do I get my email address (and others that I know are in this same situation) removed from the Church's LCR blacklist?

[russellhltn]

There's been some reports in the past where the ISP reports "invalid address" when it in fact is valid. Perhaps it was due to spam filters in place at the time.

[ambldsorg]

There's been some reports in the past where the ISP reports "invalid address" when it in fact is valid. Perhaps it was due to spam filters in place at the time.

Precisely. There are numerous reasons for which an email sent to a given email address that is perfectly legitimate might occasionally encounter trouble in delivery, even rejected emails. Not all of them justify being placed on an internal LCR blacklist. But even if there is such a thing, it should be possible to get removed from said list through some kind of appeal. The question is, how?