Unanswered Question

I am disappointed.... I asked what I thought was a very simple question several days ago, and inspite of over 40 views, not a single answer! sbradshaw, russellhltn, scgallafent, where are my gurus of all knowledge?

Here is the question again.... How can I see who is NOT getting my newsletter using Send a Message because of faulty or changed email addresses?

zaneclark wrote:I am disappointed.... I asked what I thought was a very simple question several days ago, and inspite of over 40 views, not a single answer! sbradshaw, russellhltn, scgallafent, where are my gurus of all knowledge?

Here is the question again.... How can I see who is NOT getting my newsletter using Send a Message because of faulty or changed email addresses?

The answer to your second question is that I don't know without doing some testing. I haven't touched the Send a Message code for about three years and two other developers have worked on it since then. I know what I originally did, but I don't know what kind of changes have been made to the way bounces are handled or whether the downstream service that actually pushes the message through the email servers has changed.

When I last touched the code, the email service would reject any malformed addresses (they are collected and included in the confirmation email). Once the messages have been handed off to the email service, the sending loop is complete and you get a confirmation email with any addresses that were rejected by the email service. Once the confirmation email is sent, LCR itself is done with the message. Anything that happens after the confirmation email is sent is handled by the various mail servers. I know one of the other developers had to make some changes to envelope addresses because messages were getting snagged in some spam filters. I don't know how the process of handling bounces changed with those changes to the envelope.

I don't use Send a Message frequently. Our executive secretary typically sends our ward's emails and he hasn't told me of any issues. We also have a fairly clean list of email addresses in our ward and low turnover, so we don't normally experience many issues.

That's all the information I have for you. Since I don't know for sure what currently happens with bounces (mailbox full, recipient address doesn't exist on the mail server, etc.), I really didn't have an answer to post, which i why I didn't respond.

At some time, a few years ago, I was getting confirmation of any addresses that were rejected, but this stopped, and I am pretty sure it isn't because we have a clean email list. We have 380 households, and I doubt that they all have correct addresses listed.

That may have been affected by the changes needed to deal with spam filtering. I don’t know for sure since I didn’t work on those changes.

Our two bishopric counselors and RS president all use SBCGlobal.net. When using the send-a-message function, I ALWAYS get a bounce back from their mail server that the e-mail is rejected because "it did not originate from my gmail address" (or something to that effect - I think it is technology to intercept spam email sent in someone else's behalf without their knowledge). The odd thing is they they also tell me they receive the messages even though I get the bounce back.

I am not a software expert and don't understand the email protocols used, but I only post to report that the bounce back process apparently works in this special case.

zaneclark wrote:I asked what I thought was a very simple question several days ago, and inspite of over 40 views, not a single answer!

Sometimes, "no answer" is the answer - we don't know.