Send a Message now blocking HTML?

We use the Send a Message tool (https://www.lds.org/messaging/?lang=eng) to send out a weekly newsletter/bulletin to our ward members. This is a HTML formatted email created elsewhere and we copy and paste the HTML code into the message body of the Send a Message tool.

This has been working fine for months, but this week when I hit the Send Message button I receive the following 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 get the error even when attempting to send it only to my own email address, which I know is valid. If I remove the HTML and put in plain text then it sends the email successfully. This leads me to believe that there's something blocking HTML content now (either intentionally or unintentionally).

Does anyone know anything about this? Did something change? Is it blocking HTML intentionally? Anyone else also experiencing this?

Are you using HTML code you haven't used in the past? Some apps will allow things like underline, bold, break, etc, but will block links - particularly to non-lds sites.

We've tried using the same HTML that previously worked and it no longer works.

I just tried a simple message to myself that just had a small part bold and it worked just fine.

Yes, it seems to still work with a small trivial amount of HTML, but anything more substantial starts to cause problems. Here is the HTML we're trying to send this week:

[Link available via Private Message]

I've tried to strip out various parts to see if perhaps there was something in there it didn't like, but it always seems to reject it. Again, due to the error message I receive, I'm not 100% sure it's intentionally blocking HTML... it might be an unexpected result of some other recent change.

I wonder if you're hitting a size limit.

Yeah, I thought maybe that was the problem too. So I tried sending a very large plain text email and it went through no problem.

By the way, you do realize this is a public forum and now everyone can read your newsletter, right? Is that something that should be public with all the contact info?

Thanks for the heads up. Yes, I realize that and tried to avoid posting it, but I think it's the only way to really get any help is if others can verify and troubleshoot the issue with the exact same content. I'm hoping that someone can resolve this issue quickly and then I can take down the link.

Even though you posted info specific to your ward, thanks for doing this. It never even crossed my mind that Send Message would accept HTML (and I guess now it doesn't). It's nice to see what other units are doing with the tools we have available to us. I see so many people completely ignore the tools the church has provided. I guess one issue with doing things like your ward newsletter is that you have to find somewhere else to host the graphics. If we can ever do HTML again, it might be worth experimenting more with Send Message.

By chance, I encountered a problem that seems to be related: Trying to send a simple text message, I kept getting the "Either the email service is not available or one of the recipients may have an unknown email address" error message. I found that I could send a test message to myself but not the message I wished to send out.

Initially, I thought it could be because there was a link in the body of the message, but this turned out not to be the case. After multiple test messages with pieces of my text, I found out that it was because I had signed the message with my name and "exec. secretary." When I changed it to "executive," all was fine.

I believe that the e-mail service must be doing some checking for potentially malicious messages, and maybe "exec" triggers a flag because it is a Javascript keyword. It would be nice if there were a more specific error message ("Your message has been blocked because your text contains disallowed keywords," maybe?), and of course ideally the checking should be more specific - "exec" really couldn't do anything unless it were in the context of a "script" tag, for example.

Thanks for the post Visick! It turns out it we also had the phrase "exec" in our emails (as part of our Executive Secretary's email address). After removing those references we were able to send the HTML-formatted emails.

So apparently they've modified the tool and are now scanning for potentially "harmful" keywords and rejecting those messages. I agree it would be much better if the error message was more specific and helpful.

RichardDavies wrote:So apparently they've modified the tool and are now scanning for potentially "harmful" keywords and rejecting those messages. I agree it would be much better if the error message was more specific and helpful.

Agreed. It would also be helpful if we could be enlightened as to which words were blacklisted.

I just did a quick test and found that HTML works as long as you don't use an 'img' tag. This is still useful for more involved messages that need some visual structure to make them more readable. It is too bad that images are not allowed.

A very simple message like this fails:

Jesus loves His sheep.<hr><img src="https://ldscdn.org/ml/mls-web/images/fi ... embers.jpg" alt="First Presidency letter, 29 October 2012: Finding Lost Members">

Here's an example of the HTML that worked for me:

<div style="line-height:1.4em"><h2>General Relief Society Meeting Broadcast</h2><p style="font-size:1.2em"><em>"This is God's work. May we be about it as faithfully as the dedicated little honeybees go about theirs."</em></p><p>Under the direction of the First Presidency, the Relief Society general presidency holds an annual meeting for all Relief Society women, 18 years and older. The meeting originates from the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah and will be broadcast at the ABC Stake Center on September 28, 2013 at 5:00 P.M. Pacific time located at DEF Street, HIJ City, Washington. Please be in your seats by 4:45 pm. Dessert and a light social gathering will be provided following the broadcast.</p><p><br><em><a href="http://www.lds.org/church/leader/linda- ... eng">Linda K. Burton</a>, Relief Society general president; <a href="http://www.lds.org/church/leader/carole ... ng">Carole M. Stephens</a>, first counselor; and <a href="http://www.lds.org/church/leader/linda- ... eng">Linda S. Reeves</a>, second counselor, will address Relief Society sisters worldwide at the general Relief Society meeting Saturday, September 28, 2013.</em></p><ul><li>September 28, 2013 at 5:00 P.M.</li><li>ABC Stake Center, HIJ City, Washington</li><li>Dessert provided after the broadcast</li></ul><p>The meeting will also be <a href="http://www.lds.org/church/events/2013-g ... >broadcast live online</a>, and available to be viewed later. There is also an <a href="https://www.lds.org/broadcasts/relief-s ... g">archive of Relief Society Broadcasts</a>.<br><br><br><br><br></p></div>

is html still working on "Send a Message" tool? If so can you provide a sample?

ricardoescobar wrote:is html still working on "Send a Message" tool? If so can you provide a sample?

I don't know if it works, but you could try sending a message to yourself using the example HTML in the message prior your post.