New Donation email for OLD donation

[jalldredge]

Received an email today 2/5 regarding a donation submitted last October, the 29th. The typical email I get after I submit a donation stating ‘Donation Submitted’ and that it will take 2-3 business days to process

I assume this is a glitch that the system sent out an old “Donation Submitted” confirmation. Very odd! Anyone else? any need to worry?

[rmrichesjr]

During the few days after the donation, did you receive the usual messages? In other words, were the messages delayed or duplicated?

[russellhltn]

any need to worry?

Depending on your level of technical knowledge, you could examine the email header to see if the email originated today, or if it got trapped in a server.

Without knowing why the delay in the message, I'd be keeping an eye on the transactions on your bank account.

[ambldsorg]

I assume this is a glitch that the system sent out an old “Donation Submitted” confirmation. Very odd! Anyone else? any need to worry?

It's hard to say. Some information could be gleaned by looking at the full headers of such a message. Do any of the emails request that you take action?

If you want to share the headers you could do so, but you would want to redact sensitive information first.

[jalldredge]

Not asking me to take action. Looks like the legit typical notification. I can confirm I was debited at my bank Oct 30th, 2025.

I’ll work on getting that header info. Need to get to a laptop

[eblood66]

I just had a member who reported also getting just a notification for a donation made back at the beginning of November. The donation was withdrawn from her bank account back then. I'm not sure if she received a notification back then.

I asked her to forward it to me so I could examine it. All the links are to correct without any typos or anything. There aren't any links to any non-church domains. The content looks exactly like a normal donation notification and the from address is correct. I didn't ask her to try to send it to me in a way that would preserve headers so I can check them but as far as I can tell it did come from the church.

I'm going to submit a support request to ask about it.

[ambldsorg]

I'm going to submit a support request to ask about it.

Without full headers it will be hard to tell if the messages are new or old, but it's probably still worth contacting them.

Probably what happened is some kind of an update to the backend which ended up running a bunch of triggers from the database (perhaps a restore was done and they forgot to turn off database triggers or something) and it ended up emailing some people (or everyone and they have a clogged email queue or something that they have been trying to clean up before too many people notice).

[eblood66]

Without full headers it will be hard to tell if the messages are new or old, but it's probably still worth contacting them.

True. If they need them I'll work with the member to try to get the full headers. But if you're right about what happened (and it's a reasonable guess), then just the existence of the email may be enough for them to realize what happened (if they don't know already).

Plus I asked them to confirm (for the member's peace of mind) that it isn't processing the donation again.

[Biggles]

There is now a note when you select Donations, explaining the issue! The system won't let me copy and paste the message!

[eblood66]

For the record, here's the note:

Dear donor,

As you may already know, when a donation is made online, the system generates a notification email to acknowledge receipt. Due to a technical issue, the email service failed to send many of these emails over the course of the last few weeks.

That issue has now been resolved, and the email service has resumed its normal operation. Unfortunately, the unsent emails for past donations that had been sitting in a queue were released today as a result. If you have received an email notification which shows a donation date before today, please disregard it.

That email is only a delayed notification for a donation made in the past. No donations have been re‑processed or will be withdrawn again.

We understand this may have been confusing or concerning, and we sincerely apologize for the unnecessary worry this may have caused. Please rest assured, those backdated emails were just delayed notifications for contributions made from days to several weeks ago.

Once again, we greatly appreciate your generosity and understanding.