Send a Message received by someone not in my ward

I received a reply to a recent message sent out using "Send a Message" from someone not in our ward (he asked me why he was getting the email, since he doesn't live around here). I've searched through the emails listed in our directory, and I can't seem to find the email address in question. I assume he wants to get email from his own ward or he would have just used the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and how I might fix it. I can give more details privately if it would help.

sl14g wrote:I received a reply to a recent message sent out using "Send a Message" from someone not in our ward (he asked me why he was getting the email, since he doesn't live around here). I've searched through the emails listed in our directory, and I can't seem to find the email address in question. I assume he wants to get email from his own ward or he would have just used the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and how I might fix it. I can give more details privately if it would help.

There are a variety of ways that mail might get delivered to people who aren't obviously on your mailing list:

• It's a household email address, but you were looking at individual email addresses (or vice versa)
• The email address doesn't match exactly, but is treated as a match by the email service (e.g., for Google Mail, periods are ignored, so if someone has an email address of johndoe2@gmail.com, sending to john.doe.2@gmail.com or j.ohnd.oe2@gmail.com will still come to that person)
• A recipient has set up email forwarding, so email sent to johndoefamilyreunion@gmail.com gets forwarded to john.doe@gmail.com
• A recipient is actually a distribution list, so mail sent to neighborhoodbookclub@yahoogroups.com might actually go to 20 different email addresses.

Note that any of these could be triggered by one of your members (or one of your clerks) making some slight mistake in typing their email address into the Directory on LDS.org, or MLS. It seems much more likely to be one of those kinds of mistakes, rather than the Send a Message feature just randomly sending your message to some recipient you didn't include. Tracking down those kinds of problems can be tricky. If you could get the mistaken recipient to send you the raw email message with all its headers, you might well see some clues there.