"Send a Message" error

I use "Send a Message" in Leader Resources on a regular basis and most of the time it works just fine. Today I clicked "send" and got the following error: "Your message was not sent. Either the email service is not available or one of the recipients may have an unknown email address."

I called Local Unit Support and they said they don't have a team that supports the tools on lds.org, so I would just need to post the question here. (Pretty crazy, I know!)

So does anyone here have a clue what's happening? I've tried multiple times, with the same result.

I don't know what it means that one of the recipients may have an unknown email address. I assume that an address is malformed, but how would I even go about identifying such a problem? I can see the names of the recipients and if I mouse over a name it displays the address--but it would take an awfully long time to go through 2,500 addresses.

mtwerner wrote:I use "Send a Message" in Leader Resources on a regular basis and most of the time it works just fine. Today I clicked "send" and got the following error: "Your message was not sent. Either the email service is not available or one of the recipients may have an unknown email address."

One possible cause is mentioned in this post: an inactive account on familysearch.org (belonging to a former FamilySearch employee). It's probably worth a try to look at [user]@ldschurch.org, since I would think that such accounts would go through the same validation process that familysearch.org accounts would.

Clearly there could be other reasons for that error message, but that's the only specific cause that I recall being mentioned on the forum.

mtwerner wrote:I don't know what it means that one of the recipients may have an unknown email address. I assume that an address is malformed, but how would I even go about identifying such a problem? I can see the names of the recipients and if I mouse over a name it displays the address--but it would take an awfully long time to go through 2,500 addresses.

The addresses should be in MLS, so it would be much quicker to generate a custom report that includes the member's name, household email address, and individual email address, and then do your analysis on that list in a spreadsheet application.

Thanks for pointing me to that post; I'm not sure why I didn't find it earlier. But that was indeed the problem. We had two ldschurch.org addresses, and one of them had moved into the stake just three days ago. I got that address corrected and the email broadcast worked!

I'm having the same problem - why would an errant email address stop the whole process of sending a message to a group? Shouldn't it just skip that email address and send to the others?

phodge wrote:I'm having the same problem - why would an errant email address stop the whole process of sending a message to a group? Shouldn't it just skip that email address and send to the others?

In my experience, most email programs act this way for truly invalid email addresses -- they won't send an email out if one of the addresses is invalid. Certainly Outlook, GMail and Yahoo mail work that way. Now this is slightly different, in that the email address is actually properly formed for a valid domain, but the account no longer exists. But given that these are accounts on the server being used to send the message, it's not unreasonable (and could be helpful) that the accounts are checked for validity before the message is sent.

My gripe is not that the email is not sent, but that we are not told which email address is causing the problem. Other email programs identify at least the first problematic email address so that you can find and fix the problems one by one until you have a valid list of recipients.