Church IT having trouble with legacy emails like Yahoo and AOL?

[ambldsorg]

This issue has been going on for almost a year now. Anyone have any updates?

It has not been solved. It continues to persist, however, I don't believe the problem is what many think it is.

viewtopic.php?t=45138

I believe there is a lot of misinformation being spread about the root cause of this problem. In essence, the Church is using Amazon SES to send out emails from mail.churchofjesuschrist.org. Amazon SES has an email address suppression technology that the Church must be using to filter out what it considers to be "bad" email addresses. I don't believe that AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or any of the other scapegoats are necessarily at fault, however, I won't deny that sometimes they do unwise things with respect to email, but I think we do members a disservice to lay all the blame on their ISP for this problem. It's actually more complicated than that---communication problems are a 2-way situation. The number of reasons why a message could be rejected by an ISP are varied and do not all necessarily represent a permanent condition, nor do they represent an indication that the sender is being blocked, however, it appears that the Church's suppression list is treating any failure as a permanent condition---despite the fact that the email address is working and legitimate---and once your email address ends up on the blacklist, it is currently impossible to have the Church remove that address.

You can change your email address and it will continue to work up until it ends up on the Church's blacklist again.

I don't know why it is so difficult to have this addressed from Church email administrators. Is there an unwritten policy somewhere regarding blacklisting email addresses of members? What does the handbook say?

You could try contacting Global Services Department and reqeust that they remove the block on your email address.

God Bless

[ambldsorg]

I know that at least Yahoo emails still aren't working.

Let's be clear on what is being asserted here. It is in fact not ALL Yahoo emails that are not working, but just those few who happen to get trapped in the Church's Amazon SES suppression list:

viewtopic.php?t=45138

We have one that refuses to change his Yahoo email account

And why should he? It works everywhere else, I'm sure. The problem is not with his email address, it's with the LCR system's handling of his email address.

[BrianEdwards]

I don't know why it is so difficult to have this addressed from Church email administrators. Is there an unwritten policy somewhere regarding blacklisting email addresses of members? What does the handbook say?

It indeed is frustrating. And interesting that a lot of really smart Forum users have asserted fairly different conclusions about what the root problem is, often at odds with each other's conclusions. Without any official guidance, we're just left to wonder who of all these parties is right, or are they all wrong together, and if any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?

I do appreciate in-depth Forum discussion and analysis. But I'm always hopeful that when there's no foreseeable resolution, that it doesn't lead anyone beyond normal frustration and dissatisfaction. Since this topic has been one of the most active over many years here in the Forum, and there hasn't been any actionable response from the Church, it seems like something we are just forced to (unhappily, yes) live with for the foreseeable future.

[ambldsorg]

And interesting that a lot of really smart Forum users have asserted fairly different conclusions about what the root problem is, often at odds with each other's conclusions.

As I said it's a fairly complicated issue and moreso to discuss with people who are not as well-versed in SMTP and email issues in general, so you are right to question any particular "interpretation" of the facts. You can look at the facts and come up with your own hypothesis.

1) Take a look at the full email headers that you get in a message from your Ward or Stake. You'll see something like:

Code: Select all

Return-Path: <010001845bd2c0b1-08d78184-8485-4cc3-c61b-8bc835b38c23-000000@amazonses.com>

If you don't see such a header then your email system must not be providing that. This header suggests that the LCR "Send a Message" tool is using Amazon SES to deliver emails.

2) Then consider that Amazon SES has what it calls an "account-level supression list":

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/ ... -list.html

It's not such a stretch of reason to determine that if one's email address works for everything except receiving Ward and Stake communications, that one's email address has been blacklisted in this fashion.

God Bless

[ambldsorg]

This caused intense problems and their ISP’s were threatening them, I know.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs for the world of email communication when everyone and their dog is so intent on blocking legitimate communications.

The Church has been labeled a Spammer and these email providers are refusing to deliver emails from the Church.

Well, that's an interesting claim because just the other day when I called GSC to report an email deliverability problem, they recommended that I switch to using a Gmail email address because it's the most "compatible" and yet, it's also the most likely offender in the "block all the emails quest".

The question is what can be done, especially when the Church cannot completely control how it is viewed by email providers.

I think education is one way to deal with this, rather than working in darkness. LCR should provide real and accurate email deliverability reports, not a generic statement that the message was "rejected by the server". With an actual deliverability report, the member who is having trouble receiving emails can take such information to their ISP and ask them to resolve or explain why. Yes, I know this might be futile when discussing big providers like Gmail, but accurate information is always better than obscured and useless generic errors. The other half of the problem is that once the ISP has disavowed any claim that they are blocking the message, the Church needs to be approachable and make it possible to have the member's email address removed from the suppression list:

viewtopic.php?t=45138

Regarding using other technologies, e.g. Texting, WhatsApp, or whatever; unfortunately none of them are as ubiquitous as email.

Perhaps the ward and stakes simply need to fully utilize the Calendar properly (with explicit details instead of cryptic references and abbreviations/acronyms) and put everything there and depend on members to access it.

That's not a bad idea and could be augmented by the use of RSS, though, to be fair I have a hard time recommending something I don't use myself. Again, this is less useful as it is not as ubiquitous as email.

Like it or not, email is going to be very difficult to supplant. People who use free email providers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. need to be willing to hold their providers accountable for the interruptions in communication that they cause when they block legitimate emails. But the Church can improve things in this regard by providing accurate information. Until this happens, the situation isn't going to improve much. For those who insist on using free email providers, I recommend ProtonMail (at least until I find a reason to stop recommending them).

God Bless

[ambldsorg]

It is in fact not ALL Yahoo emails that are not working, but just those few who happen to get trapped in the Church's Amazon SES suppression list:

Correction on my part: I suppose it's entirely possible that at the time Yahoo may have been blocking all communications coming from mail.churchofjesuschrist.org (via Amazon SES), even though the most likely cause of member trouble is the suppression list.

I didn't mean to minimize the actual problems at hand but merely tried to point out that the most likely cause of any trouble is the Amazon SES suppression list. Yes, ISPs can and do reject emails for any number of reasons. Not all rejected emails indicate that delivery to the recipient should be prevented forever, however, if delivery to a given email address persists then it is reasonable to cease delivering email to said address until a human intervenes. There currently is no way for a human to intervene and have the email address "cleared of all wrongdoing."

In other threads I have suggested that Account settings could have an option to "reconnect" (to use Church employee terms) , or "revalidate" the email address, which action would allow a human to intervene.

[kristaanncook]

I queried the Church about this problem, using the floating feedback tab. This is what I got:

It should be resolved as of now. But it can be an issue. Most ISP’s rely on a few organizations that blacklist domains that they see as spam. This can be an issue with many different issues, but the Church has worked to comply with the organizations that they know about that can give block lists to ISP’s. But for now it should be resolved as far as I know.

This is not part of my job, I have just heard the discussions in the past.

[ambldsorg]

This is what I got:

Most ISP’s rely on a few organizations that blacklist domains that they see as spam.

Thanks for sharing. If I had to guess, the "few organizations" to which it refers are most likely those "organizations" that provide RBL (real-time blackhole lists), or perhaps email reputation services. Most of them are terribly managed and often blacklist legitimate and non-spam sources of email. I no longer recommend using most of the RBLs that are out there.

One thing that I should point out... the Church is no longer delivering its own email in many cases, having delegated that to Amazon SES (or in some cases Marketo/Adobe or Microsoft), so the RBL situation isn't really relevant because RBLs are unlikely to blacklist Amazon SES. That's precisely why organizations flock to such services. But the downside is that they have to invent other mechanisms to deal with senders that appear to send "spam", ergo the Amazon SES suppression list. Amazon SES doesn't want its reputation damaged because one of their customers is sending out "spam" email, so they place restrictions on their customers (like the Church). It's definitely a challenging problem.