"Send a Message" Function on LCR

[Hilohi]

I've had problems for months with the formatting of Send a Message. I send a weekly email for our Aaronic Priesthood Quorums. I never know when Send a Message is going to keep the white space I put in my messages. Today I tried putting a period on each blank line and that worked to maintain spacing between paragraphs. I am sharing this in case it helps anyone else. My browser is the latest Windows version of Google Chrome.

sample:
Young Men and your families,
.
.
Temple: Pres. Russell M. Nelson: "Spending more time in the temple builds faith. And your service and worship in the temple will help you 'think celestial.' …There you are drawn closer to the Savior and given greater access to His power. There you are guided in solving the problems in your life, even your most perplexing problems. We are grateful to announce our plans to build a temple in … Colorado Springs, Colorado!"
.
.
“Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
.
.


Previous unsuccessful attempts:

• pasting from Microsoft Word

• pasting from Google Doc

• manually deleting the white space once I've copied and pasted the email text, and then manually reinserting returns where I want them (returns still got stripped out in the sent version of the email)

I hope this is helpful.

What works for me is pressing enter after a paragraph, pressing the space bar and then pressing enter to start a new paragraph. That creates a blank line between paragraphs. I draft my message in Google docs using this method and then I copy-and-paste my message into Send a Message, but I believe this also works if you draft your message in Send a Message (as opposed to copy and pasting from another program)

[kclemans]

Thank you, I will try that! Mahalo!

[dkarbuckle]

I've had problems for months with the formatting of Send a Message. I send a weekly email for our Aaronic Priesthood Quorums. I never know when Send a Message is going to keep the white space I put in my messages. Today I tried putting a period on each blank line and that worked to maintain spacing between paragraphs. I am sharing this in case it helps anyone else. My browser is the latest Windows version of Google Chrome.

sample:
Young Men and your families,
.
.
Temple: Pres. Russell M. Nelson: "Spending more time in the temple builds faith. And your service and worship in the temple will help you 'think celestial.' …There you are drawn closer to the Savior and given greater access to His power. There you are guided in solving the problems in your life, even your most perplexing problems. We are grateful to announce our plans to build a temple in … Colorado Springs, Colorado!"
.
.
“Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
.
.


Previous unsuccessful attempts:

• pasting from Microsoft Word

• pasting from Google Doc

• manually deleting the white space once I've copied and pasted the email text, and then manually reinserting returns where I want them (returns still got stripped out in the sent version of the email)

I hope this is helpful.

What works for me is pressing enter after a paragraph, pressing the space bar and then pressing enter to start a new paragraph. That creates a blank line between paragraphs. I draft my message in Google docs using this method and then I copy-and-paste my message into Send a Message, but I believe this also works if you draft your message in Send a Message (as opposed to copy and pasting from another program)

Another option is to use "Shift Enter which seems to create a hard end of line. So if you want a blank line, do this twice. This method has always worked for me, although it's a bit of a pain and you wouldn't think this should be necessary.

BTW, I have found that pasting from any other documents usually produces terrible results with regards to maintaining the format. I now use the paste as plain text and then go back and reformat the document

[MDJackson]

Last week, despite numberous tries, I was never able to send out our weekly ward newsletter using "Send a Message." Today, I am again trying to send out the newsletter and continue to get the error message: "There was an error sending your message. Please try again later." As we all know, it's a pain to keep trying to re-send as each time you have to re-format the entire message. What's going on? Is there any way for me to send out the message? I'm located in the U.S. (Virginia) and it is Feb 23, 2024[/b]. The app is so problematic. We have dozens of ward members who never receive any messages sent out from the "Send a Message" function. Will this ever be fixed???

[BrianEdwards]

Will this ever be fixed???

Well, since I see us on page 56 of a thread that began in 2015, I wouldn't hold my breath. That said, just this week the Church came out with functionality for teachers to record attendance in the Tools app, which many Forum members (myself included) did not expect anytime soon (if ever). So that's a reminder that we truly don't have a window into Church development priorities or efforts. And all we can do is our best to find workarounds, when functionality doesn't function.

My only hope is that since many Church IT employees are also church members with leadership callings that would benefit from "Send a Message" fixes, they're hopefully well aware of these issues, and are working through whatever technical and other issues are needed.

[Hilohi]

Last week, despite numberous tries, I was never able to send out our weekly ward newsletter using "Send a Message." Today, I am again trying to send out the newsletter and continue to get the error message: "There was an error sending your message. Please try again later." As we all know, it's a pain to keep trying to re-send as each time you have to re-format the entire message. What's going on? Is there any way for me to send out the message? I'm located in the U.S. (Virginia) and it is Feb 23, 2024[/b]. The app is so problematic. We have dozens of ward members who never receive any messages sent out from the "Send a Message" function. Will this ever be fixed???

Are you sending your newsletter as an attachment or as a link? If the former, does the attachment show as 0kb (referring to the size of the document)? You can see the size of your attachment after you attach your newsletter to your message - there will be a number in parenthesis next to the attachment. I use two separate Mac computers concurrently when I work on my calling and I used to attach documents from one Mac to the other Mac, the latter of which is where I would draft my messages in Send a Message. Recently, for some unknown reason, using that process would render some attachments as 0kb files, which would cause me to get the same error message you shared. To get around that, I start attaching the same files, but from the computer on which I drafted my messages in Send a Message. Not sure if this is the same case with you, but I just thought I'd share in case it was.

[zaneclark]

I use a Mac for my newsletter, and occasionally there will be a problem in opening "Send a Message" or in sending it. I normally use Safari, but when there is a problem, I switch to Chrome for a few days. Always seems to work.

[fredbloem]

For all these reasons, I have stopped the "Send a Message" app completely.

I have exported all the ward emails to a Google Docs file that I am sharing with all members of the ward council and everyone else who has a need to send messages to the ward.

I have two main categories: 1) Relief Society, 2) elders quorum. I check the Move In/Move Out reports regularly and update the Google Docs file accordingly.

When sending out messages, I copy and paste the email addresses in the BCC field of my email program.

[gregneg]

How do you export the emails? (I am hoping you mean the email addresses)

[russellhltn]

You'll probably need to check back for updates. In addition to move in/move out, members can change their email address as well as change their preferences on receiving emails from local leaders. You're going to miss that without regular updates.

Note that by emailing directly, you take the risk of being flagged/reported as a spammer and losing access to your email account.