Tech Forum Archive

"Send A Message" - unable to send to all members

36 postsstarted by kmertlich 12,543 viewsoriginal topic

kmertlich
New Member
#1
I am unable to use the "Send A Message" feature located with the Leaders & Clerks Resource page. When I select to send to all stake adult members I receive an error message.

"Your message was not sent. Either the email service is not available or one of the recipients may have an unknown email address."

I am able to send emails to myself or smaller groups. How can I resolve this issue?
genman
Member
#2
I have not seen that before. Not sure why one unknown email address would prevent the message from being sent. My guess is that the server was down when you tried. Is it still happening? And, I'm not sure how you send things to "all stake adult members". I have personally never received a Send A Message that was directed to the entire stake. I assumed that it was either not supported, or the stake presidency prefers to send things to Bishops to get the word out that way.
kmertlich
New Member
#3
genman wrote:I have not seen that before. Not sure why one unknown email address would prevent the message from being sent. My guess is that the server was down when you tried. Is it still happening? And, I'm not sure how you send things to "all stake adult members". I have personally never received a Send A Message that was directed to the entire stake. I assumed that it was either not supported, or the stake presidency prefers to send things to Bishops to get the word out that way.

I had hoped that it was just the server being down. But that does not seem to be the problem. If it where then I am a very unlucky person because over the past month or two I have attempted to send three different requested messages out to "All adult members" and continue to get the same error message. As a general rule i will create a message first, send the message to my email account as a test, and then distribute to the larger group. As I mentioned, I'm able to send out messages to small groups.
This feature has worked in the past because since it became available I have sent approximately six stake messages to all members. Announcing stake conference is an example of what has been distributed.

The two category options available to the stake are to send to Leaders and Members. The "All adult members" is a group under Members. The other group under Members is to send to "All Members".

Any help you can provide in tracking down the "one of the recipients may have an unknown email address." would be greatly appreciated.
kmertlich
New Member
#4
I may have found one possible reason for the error message. Tonight I was sending a message to a Ward Council and one member, who use to work for familysearch.org, has not yet updated his email address in lds.org. His email account is still listed as [accountname]@familysearch.org. This email account is no longer valid. There seems to be some validation checking taking place on the church email accounts that flags it as an "unknown email address".

If I try to send and email through my gmail account to [accountname]@familysearch.org I receive the following email back:
--------------
DELIVERY STATUS NOTIFICATION (FAILURE)
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
xxxx@familysearch.org
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 User Unknown (state 14).
------------

Hopefully this will help to resolve the problem.
Thanks
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#5
That would go along with the original error message you posted.

This sounds like a weak link (bug) in the messaging system. It is very likely that members will have invalid e-mail addresses as they forget to update their profiles. The system needs to be able to identify the invalid e-mail addresses and ignore them. If not then there will continue to be failures in the system to send group e-mails.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
genman
Member
#6
jdlessley wrote:It is very likely that members will have invalid e-mail addresses as they forget to update their profiles. The system needs to be able to identify the invalid e-mail addresses and ignore them.

The system does not appear to choke on every non-working email address. The example given was for an obsolete church-domain email address (e.g. @familysearch.org). So, the problem may not be as bad as you think. Having said that, I agree that the system should not prevent other emails from going out just because of a problem with one. However, would be nice if there was a way of highlighting the known invalid addresses so a clerk or executive secretary can follow-up on it.
kmertlich
New Member
#7
Correct. It appears the issue is with church domain email accounts (e.g. @familysearch.org, @ldschurch.org, ...).
Is someone from the development team reviewing these posts or should I be using someother means to communicate this bug?
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#8
The front-end development lead for LDS.org is Aaron Barker. He has been a regular on these forums. There are others also who frequent the forums. Whether or not they have noticed this particular thread issue is unknown.

Normally I would suggest submitting feedback using the "Do You Have Feedback On This Page?" link found on most LDS.org pages. But unfortunately Leader and Clerk Resources pages do not have this link. But you could use the one found on the LDS.org home page.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
tclubb
New Member
#9
I am the Bishop of my Ward and when I have tried sending an email to either individuals or groups (EQ, HP) some of the individuals I get this message "recipients have opted out or do not have an email address in Ward Directory / MLS". When I go to the directory and check the email status I noticed the ones that have their email setting set to “Ward” or Private (Leadership only) get this message. I conducted an informal low tech test to prove my theory and had one of the members change their status from ward visibility to stake visibility and I was able to send them an email. But when their status was at ward or private (Leadership only), I was not able to send them an email and received the same message “recipients have opted out or do not have an email address in Ward Directory / MLS”.

Is this an error in the system or is it intended to be this way?
rivasj01
New Member
#10
I find that it is easier and more successful when I copy the emails abd paste them into a compose email in Gmail. Gmail with return separate messages for those recipients that were not recognized by s postmaste. The problem is usually caused when a member's email is not updated. LDS does not only does send messages if there is an error in one of the receipients, even the ones with email errors.
genman
Member
#11
rivasj01 wrote:I find that it is easier and more successful when I copy the emails and paste them into a compose email in Gmail.

Where exactly do you copy them from? I tried to copy them from the Send A Message To list, but that just copies the names and not the email addresses? Do you mean you individually look up each person and copy and paste their email address one at a time into a Gmail compose message? If so, that doesn't sound easier.
aebrown
Community Administrator
#12
genman wrote:Where exactly do you copy them from?

My guess is that he's using the Directory to send emails. The Directory just uses your computer's email client, so it's easy to capture the email addresses. But with the Send A Message feature, you're certainly right that the email addresses can't be captured.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
genman
Member
#13
aebrown wrote:The Directory just uses your computer's email client, so it's easy to capture the email addresses.

Oh I see that Directory lets you send to some groups under Ward Leaders and Ward Organizations. The list of groups in Directory is significantly less than what is there for Send A Message, though. For example there does not appear to be a way to send a message via Directory to All Members, PEC, Ward Council, etc. Also, many people don't even use an email client but rather just manage email via web page.

I agree that it easier and more flexible to use a distribution list in your email address book to communicate. Given all of the many list types in Send A Message, it should would help in creating distribution lists if there was a copy feature that captured the email addresses. Then could paste that in the To box of an email, whether or not you had a local email client installed.

Might be good for a future enhancement to Send A Message, but probably low priority given all of the other things they are working on.
genman
Member
#14
genman wrote:Then could paste that in the To box of an email.

Mea culpa. I meant to say by default to paste that into the "Bcc" box of an email, like Send A Message does.

Although for smaller distribution groups, it is sometimes useful to send non-blind-copy if a reply-all is wanted. That's another limitation of Send A Message.
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#15
I would be concerned about capturing the e-mail addresses from the Send A Message feature in Leader and Clerk Resources for privacy reasons. It is possible that someone capturing e-mail addresses and then pasting them in the "To" line, or "Cc" line of in an e-mail client (this includes web based messaging) could inadvertently do so for members who have set their visibility/privacy setting to private. Most, if not all, of those who have access to Leader and Clerk Resources are leaders that have access to those private e-mail addresses.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
genman
Member
#16
jdlessley wrote:It is possible that someone capturing e-mail addresses and then pasting them in the "To" line, or "Cc" line...could inadvertently do so for members who have set their visibility/privacy setting to private.
Right now the Send A Message list does not include anyone with their visibility settings set to anything but full stake visibility. In other words, if you change your visibility/privacy setting to be Ward-only or Leadership-only, you cannot receive any messages via Send A Message. Bug or feature, that's the way it works.
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#17
genman wrote:Right now the Send A Message list does not include anyone with their visibility settings set to anything but full stake visibility.
But that is not the intended functionality. They are working on the bug.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
sasgrw
Member
#18

Send a Message - Capturing Email Addresses

aebrown wrote:...But with the Send A Message feature, you're certainly right that the email addresses can't be captured.

That's not completely accurate. Perhaps you can say it's not *easy* to capture email address from Send A Message, but it's not impossible either. When using Firebug on Firefox (F12), you can easily view the html for the webpage after you've clicked on the group you want to send the email to. (This does not work if you use "View Source" in Firefox or Internet Explorer because the html source is generated.)

If you're comfortable with Firebox, you can use the "click on an element" tool (2nd one in the toolbar) and then click on the box surrounding all the email addresses. It you expand the <div> tags you'll see something like

<div class="recipients toggled">
or
<div class="recipients scrolled">

(depending on if you clicked on 'view all' or 'minimize' in the email list box). Under that <div> tag is a very readable list of email addresses that look like

Code: 

<span class="recipient" title="[B]foo@gmail.com[/B]">some name</span>
<span class="recipient" title="bar@gmail.com">another name</span>
<span class="recipient" title="baz@yahoo.com">third name</span>
etc

You can copy/paste that list of <span> tags to a simple text editor and do a simple block mark and a few regular expression replacement strings and get a list that you can copy to a regular email program.

Like I said, it's not easy, but it is doable. It sounds like a lot of work, and perhaps it is for the first time user, but I've done this a bunch of times and it only takes about 30 seconds for me to have a final list of email addresses that I can copy/paste.

Your mileage may vary...
DougBrewer
New Member
#19

Send A Message

What permissions are required to be able to send all members an e-mail blast. I understand as Stake Assistant Executive Secretary I should be able to but it only gives me the options of sending to leaders only? Any help is appreciated Brethren

Doug Brewer
Tallahassee Florida
sasgrw
Member
#20
The wikitalks about who has permissions to the leadership portal. "Assistant Executive Secretary (Stake only)" is included. It sounds like you're already getting to the website but that the people you can email is limited.

Are you trying to email all members of the Stake?

(As an interesting asside, try going to the leadership portal > Other (menu) > Access Table. In the "Select a Role" dropdown, choose "Assistant Stake Executive Secretary". You can see all the options you're allowed access to. It only lists the items from the menu. Since "Send a Message" is not on the menu (it's a separate button), you don't see that in the table.)
mtwerner
Member
#21

Re:

jdlessley wrote:
genman wrote:Right now the Send A Message list does not include anyone with their visibility settings set to anything but full stake visibility.
But that is not the intended functionality. They are working on the bug.
Has there been any progress on this bug fix? I'm tempted to write to everyone in my stake who has their address set to "private" and ask whether I can change the setting, but that seems bad form to ask them to change it because of a bug. However, I also send a fair number of emails to stake members and worry about how many people are unknowingly not receiving them.
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#22
Nothing reported yet.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
joelbeevers
New Member
#23

Email Permission not Updating

We have been trying to send emails to the whole ward through the Leader Resources. We noticed that only email addresses from members that have their email permission set to "Ward Visibility" or "Stake Visibility" would be included in the email. We gained permission from individuals to change their permissions to "Ward Visibility" (it is opt-in in our country unlike in the USA where it is opt-out) and updated them, but even almost a week later the system still does not include some of these addresses in the mass email to the ward. I assumed at first that it was just that the system was slow and needed time for the permissions to go through all the required databases, but it surely doesn't take this long. Any idea what is the problem here and whether it can be fixed? It defeats the point if we have to send emails manually instead.
aebrown
Community Administrator
#24

Re: Email Permission not Updating

joelbeevers wrote:We have been trying to send emails to the whole ward through the Leader Resources. We noticed that only email addresses from members that have their email permission set to "Ward Visibility" or "Stake Visibility" would be included in the email.
[Moderator Note: I moved this post from the Directory forum into the existing topic for this issue in the correct Leader and Clerk Resources forum.]

As you can see from other posts in this topic, what most people experience is that only Stake Visibility allows messages to be sent using the Send a Message feature. Perhaps that would explain why you still can't send messages after you change members' visibility from Private to Ward. I'd recommend that you try changing the visibility to Stake and see if you then can send a message.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
ZundelMJ
New Member
#25
Today, our stake is looking to use email more. I was looking at 2 ways to send out the emails: from the directory or from Leader Resources. I don't know if this is related to the thread as we have not tried to send a mass email yet. I am seeing discrepancies between the two systems. I am seeing the message "1 recipients have opted out or do not have an email address in Ward Directory / MLS" and not including that individual in my observation.

Without using names, here is what I am seeing:
Using the Directory, I select Sake Young Women Presidency. I then click the link "Email Stake Young Women Presidency Leaders" which generates an email on my local system (Outlook). I can see the president, 2nd counselor, and secretary in the email to field, just like what is shown in the directory.

Using Leader Resources, I click on "Send a Message" which opens a new tab. I then click on Leaders to expand the list of leaders and then "Stake Young Women Presidency" and it gives me the error about one individual that has opted out (understandable for the 1st counselor). The only person listed to be sent the message is the 2nd counselor.

This would lead me to believe that the directory has better information, that is until I compare another organization.

Using the Directory, I select Stake Relief Society Presidency. I click "Email Stake Relief Society Presidency Leaders". I get the President and the 2nd Counselor in the email to field.

Using Leader Resources, I click on "Send a Message", "Leaders, and then "Stake Relief Society Presidency". This gives me the names of the President, 2nd councilor, and Secretary.

Now, I don't know which is working correctly. Both systems seem to have either limitations or bugs.

I did some spot checking with other organizations and found some are exactly the same, while others still are different. I can not find any consistency.

Now for my questions:
1. Does this seem to be related to the original problem?
2. Can someone give me more insight as to how these systems work?
2a. I think I understand about opting out, but I don't know if this plays a role in this issue.
jonesrk
Church Employee
#26
Using Leader Resources Send a Message, I have found that for me it will report those that don't have an email address. If they have marked their privacy as anything other than stake (I don't think it is just the email setting either), then they just 'mysteriously' don't show up in the email list.
mtwerner
Member
#27
That's not my experience. When it says, "X recipients have opted out or do not have an email address in Ward Directory / MLS," I can click "view all" and it also lists the names of those who are not set to "stake visibility" (I have verified a number of them).
jonesrk
Church Employee
#28
mtwerner wrote:That's not my experience. When it says, "X recipients have opted out or do not have an email address in Ward Directory / MLS," I can click "view all" and it also lists the names of those who are not set to "stake visibility" (I have verified a number of them).
That is what my stake clerk sees as well. I'm not sure why it won't show those for me as an assistant clerk, but that is what I found.
dbezzant
New Member
#29

Re:

jdlessley wrote:
genman wrote:Right now the Send A Message list does not include anyone with their visibility settings set to anything but full stake visibility.
But that is not the intended functionality. They are working on the bug.
This is still a problem, when will this be fixed? I use it all the time to send email to ward council and pec. Be nice to have fixed.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#30

Re: Re:

dbezzant wrote:
jdlessley wrote:
genman wrote:Right now the Send A Message list does not include anyone with their visibility settings set to anything but full stake visibility.
But that is not the intended functionality. They are working on the bug.
This is still a problem, when will this be fixed? I use it all the time to send email to ward council and pec. Be nice to have fixed.
The church rarely gives that information out in advance. It will be fixed, when it's fixed.
Have you searched the Help Center? Try doing a Google search and adding "site:churchofjesuschrist.org/help" to the search criteria.

So we can better help you, please edit your Profile to include your general location.
trunner
New Member
#31

Clerk Resources Email Function Not Working

Trying to send an email to all Ward members and get a message that either the email function is not working or there is a bad email address. I can send a test message to myself without a problem. This has happened once before and after multiple attempts to sent an email, all attempted email with sent out (multiple emails to all Ward members). Talked to the support team and their answer with to get email address for all 160 members that had opted out or did not have an email address on lds.org. This is not a practical solution!!! Please fix this issue as it prevents Ward Clerks from sending email messages out to all Ward members.

Tom Runner
trunner@knology.net
phodge
New Member
#32
FYI - I have had problems sending email through Leader Resources - and, playing around with it, I discovered the failed message would succeed if I shortened it. There must be a character limit on emails... If so, it would seem a msg stating the character limit was exceeded would be preferable to a msg which says that either the system is down, or there is an invalid email address in MLS... Just sayin'....
jonesrk
Church Employee
#33
I've sent some pretty long messages in the past. You might check to see if there was a problem character in the text you removed.
jdlessley
Community Moderators
#34
[Moderator note: This post (three posts back) was merged with this thread because the topics are the same, or at least closely related.]
trunner wrote:Please fix this issue as it prevents Ward Clerks from sending email messages out to all Ward members.
We recommend you send feedback using the LDS.org feedback link. That is the official feedback source. While there is a chance someone who can do something about the problem may visit this forum, it is not certain.

As you can see from this thread there is a discussion attempting to locate the cause of the problem.
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
phodge
New Member
#35
Maybe it was a bad character, but still, a msg to that effect would be better than what was returned...
trunner
New Member
#36
OK, just tried again but this time I cut the message length in half and sent the Announcement in two parts. I worked!!! Looks like the previous error message leaves a lot to be desired -- problem has nothing to do with email addresses. Problem was with message length. Thanks for the help.