Not Receiving Emails

I'm not sure if this is correct place to ask for help, but I am not receiving any emails from the church. I have all the correct boxes checked in my account settings, the correct email address, but not receiving any of the announcements from the church. I would appreciate any help. Thanks!

Are you able to log into the Directory or the Calendar? I'm looking for evidence you have your account associated with your membership record.

Yes, on lds.org I am able to see both my Ward directory and calendar. Thanks.

I'm out of ideas. I see you have a Gmail account - same as me.

Do check and make sure it's not being stuck under "Promotions" or "Social". I find them in there from time to time. Sometimes even "Spam".

Yeah, there is nothing under Promotions, Social, Updates, or Spam. Thanks for your help!

This is an ongoing problem in our stake, where a stake leader will use the Send a Message app in LCR to send an email to an organizational group but it doesn't get through to *some* of theme in the group. Not in spam, not in any other folder in their email. Suggestions? The problem is not with the personal email accounts or the email address entries in the membership record.

Some email domains don't like the messages. byu.net has been particularly problematic.

This seems to be a BUG in the send email application. With some testing, I have found the emails WITH ATTACHMENTS aren't sent to all selected recipients on the chosen list. Emails without attachments do seem to go out to everyone. How do we log this as a bug?

david.handy wrote:How do we log this as a bug?

Send feedback from the Send A Message page. That feedback is routed to those who direct the programmer's priorities. You can include a link to this thread if you want - the decision makers at the church don't visit this user-to-user mutual help forum and will likely never see posts here.

One of our Ward Clerks discovered that an email entered as "Household" email address was not getting received when a Ward message was sent to all members. He entered the same email address as the member's individual email address and messages were received.
It makes sense on the individual and household separation...
• A message to all sisters will not go to household.
• Likewise, a message to all brothers will not go to household.
• these email addresses must be assigned to the proper member role.

At least one family member needs to have a value set for their personal email address.

They should probably get rid of the household email. There is no way to use "send a message" and send to a household email.

Same for me

I'm the Executive Secretary in our ward, a member in our ward isn't receiving emails sent out by the ward. I sent a test email from my personal Gmail account and she received the message. I sent a test message from the message application on the church website and this is the error I received in the confirmation email:

Your message has been sent.

The recipients below were rejected by the server. Please verify their email addresses.

How do I find out if her email address has been blacklisted?

I would think she will have to explore why her ISP is blocking the email. The message indicates the email from the church is being blocked by HER email server, I believe.

I'm having the same issue when I send out the weekly ward email. All gmail addresses. If I send them a personal email, it works. What else can I try? See below. Thanks!

The screenshot: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7n95jgn1p7idtQsf8

geekiemommie wrote: Sat Jul 16, 2022 6:39 pm I'm having the same issue when I send out the weekly ward email. All gmail addresses. If I send them a personal email, it works. What else can I try? See below. Thanks!

The screenshot: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7n95jgn1p7idtQsf8

There's not a lot you can do except forward the email to the ones that it rejects (preferably using blind carbon copy for privacy reasons) to them directly. This is what I have to do for a few of our stake leaders whose gmail addresses reject every email the church system sends them.

I'm seeing this with weekly emails I send out too. Gmail and Yahoo both. There are probably others I don't know about.

Basically the system the Church is using to send emails is not working, whether anyone is willing to admit it there or not and fix it is the question.

We're having the same issue in our ward. I don't have an answer, but hoping if enough people bring it up someone will look into it.

tnash wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:16 pm We're having the same issue in our ward. I don't have an answer, but hoping if enough people bring it up someone will look into it.

Bringing it up on this user-to-user mutual help forum will have little effect. You should provide feedback from the Send A Message web page in order to get it in front of those who direct the programmer's priorities.

As an Elders Quorum President in Oklahoma, I'm not having any problems sending or receiving the messages on my Gmail account. I don't send very many, but I have sent some successfully (and received some successfully) since this latest round of problems began to be reported on the forum.

So there is no one from Church tech that is going to weigh in on this for 2 years on Gmail addresses?
We purged a bunch of emails a month ago because they came back as undeliverable. But we have a new member that has a Gmail account and it came back as undeliverable.
Now I am wondering if we should not have deleted the addresses.

donsigman wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:10 am So there is no one from Church tech that is going to weigh in on this for 2 years on Gmail addresses?

Unlikely. The Church does not normally weigh in on issues. And if by "Church tech" you mean this forum, even as moderators our influence is no greater than that of anyone else who submits information through the normal feedback channels.

The developers rarely read this forum. They quietly proceed using the priorities set by the priesthood leaders to whom they report. I agree that it is frustrating. But they do not report to me.

davesudweeks wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:32 pm

tnash wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:16 pm We're having the same issue in our ward. I don't have an answer, but hoping if enough people bring it up someone will look into it.

Bringing it up on this user-to-user mutual help forum will have little effect. You should provide feedback from the Send A Message web page in order to get it in front of those who direct the programmer's priorities.

As an Elders Quorum President in Oklahoma, I'm not having any problems sending or receiving the messages on my Gmail account. I don't send very many, but I have sent some successfully (and received some successfully) since this latest round of problems began to be reported on the forum.

We have all successfully sent some and received some, the issue is an increasing number of them are not being sent or received successfully by leaders, clerks and members. Trust in the system will be difficult to recover after such a massive, long standing issue. Meanwhile, there is no indication to those who have the ability to send messages via the system that there is a problem. No notice on line, no email, nothing. We have just word of mouth and this tech web page, which is also not widely made known. Many leaders have no idea this email feature is a problem, and that is a direct result of a total lack of official communication about it.

So I have fixed my not receiving the emails but I am not sure for how long! I did notice that right before it occurred that I was no longer receiving my emails I got a huge amount of confirmation emails from the temple. I mean it was like 30 confirmation emails about my appointment the next morning I don't know if that plays a part in any of it but it's almost like whatever was connected to my account went on overload. But what I did was change my email I went from my Yahoo to my Gmail and it started working like it should again. I don't know if it is specific to One account or if I had used that email for too long or what caused it to have an issue with that particular account considering that my Yahoo and my Gmail are exactly the same letter for letter number for number as far as address goes the only difference is one is Gmail and one is ymail. But that's what I did and so far it has continued to work properly again don't know if this helps anybody don't know if this gives any insight but that's what I did

I called Salt Lake two weeks ago regarding this issue. They said it's mainly affecting Yahoo accounts, but it can affect other email providers as well. So switching away from Yahoo probably fixed your issue, but from what I understand it's random. They recently added a text box on the 'Send a Message' page that warns you some emails are not going through, and they're working on it.

I set up a gmail forward to yahoo and the forward was blocked by yahoo servers with a 554 5.7.9 error "permanent error." This is yahoo's definition of the 554 error:

A 553 or 554 SMTP error indicates an email could not be delivered due to a permanent problem.
Message delivery can be permanently deferred because:
* You're trying to send a message to an invalid email address.
* Your message failed authentication checks against your sending domain's DMARC or DKIM policy.
* The message contains characteristics that Yahoo won't accept for policy reasons.
* Other suspicious behavior which leads Yahoo to issue a permanent rejection for your SMTP connection.
* Your IP is listed by Spamhaus. Please check with https://www.spamhaus.org.
If you consistently receive 5xx errors when sending to Yahoo, we encourage you to review our Sender Best Practices, since 5xx errors can be a symptom of a more widespread, general problem.
You should not retry sending an email that comes back with with a 5xx error. List managers should have a policy for removing email addresses that generate 5xx errors/bounces.

Hope this helps anyone.

If this was an automatic forward, they are known to break certain checks and balances (especially SPF, hence DMARC) that verify the sender's identity. The fact that you got an error message might simply mean that DMARC, SPF, and/or DKIM are functioning normally. Here's a good read on the subject:

How forwarding can break DMARC

Neither my husband's email nor mine is listed as Household.

He receives emails from the Church domain and I do not.

This may be a 'fluke' in the example you shared...but it isn't showing as a solution for us...

:-/

Glennamp wrote: Mon Jan 23, 2023 4:02 pm He receives emails from the Church domain and I do not.

Does your husband use the same email domain? I find yours to be rather unusual. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the church is having an issue sending to that domain.

bkuepper wrote: Sun Jul 10, 2022 9:14 am How do I find out if her email address has been blacklisted?

I've been trying to obtain an answer to this very question for many years now. I realize that this is an old thread, but the problem is still present and has not been resolved.

I believe that her address has in fact been blacklisted:

viewtopic.php?t=45138

Maybe you could try Global Services Department to see if they can solve it.

caillines wrote: Tue Jul 19, 2022 1:31 am This is what I have to do for a few of our stake leaders whose gmail addresses reject every email the church system sends them.

I presume you're referring to the return email that you get back that says "The recipients below were rejected by the server.", right? Well, what's missing from that report is which server rejcted it.

I don't think that Gmail is rejecting all these emails. While Gmail has it's own problems, I think it's more likely that the Church's own blacklist is responsible for a persistent rejection policy of emails.

viewtopic.php?t=45138

It's possible that Gmail rejected one or two messages as they are wont to do, but this then triggered an addition to the Church's suppression list at Amazon SES.

garystroble wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 2:51 pm Basically the system the Church is using to send emails is not working, whether anyone is willing to admit it there or not and fix it is the question.

The system that they are using for sending emails is Amazon SES and it does in fact have a suppression list and once your email address is on the Church's suppression list, you will no longer be able to receive emails from your Ward or Stake. You will, however, continue to receive other "official" emails from other Church departments that are not using mail.churchofjesuschrist.org. For example, you should get those from @message.ChurchofJesusChrist.org because it does not use Amazon SES for sending emails. Instead it appears to be using a service from Adobe/Marketo. Maybe they are working towards migrating to this other system and that's why there's no incentive to fix the current deliverability problems.

viewtopic.php?t=45138

russellhltn wrote: Mon Jan 23, 2023 4:15 pm Does your husband use the same email domain? I find yours to be rather unusual. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the church is having an issue sending to that domain.

Well, that's not so unusual. We know that thousands of members are using Gmail and they receive them just fine. Then we also know that there are numerous members who are also using Gmail and they do not receive them, and in fact, the LCR system reports that they were "rejected by the server". And that this rejection appears to be permanent for that subset of email addresses. Is this likely to be Gmail that is causing this? Yahoo, or Hotmail, or any other email provider?

ambldsorg wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 8:58 pm It's possible that Gmail rejected one or two messages as they are wont to do, but this then triggered an addition to the Church's suppression list at Amazon SES.

One of the ways to get labeled a spammer is to keep sending emails to an address you've been told isn't good. If GMail is rejecting, then the problem is on them. The servers are taking the message at face value.

russellhltn wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2025 12:34 am One of the ways to get labeled a spammer is to keep sending emails to an address you've been told isn't good. If GMail is rejecting, then the problem is on them. The servers are taking the message at face value.

But why is a legitimate email address "not good"? Why would Gmail tell mail.churchofjesuschrist.org that an address that is good everywhere else is "not good" when it comes from the Church and then proceed to treat it as a spammer?

It really depends on the reason for why it wasn't good. There are two types of email rejection. A 4XX level rejection which is considered a temporary failure, and a 5XX level rejection which is considered permanent. If Gmail returns a 4XX then the MTA will retry delivery for some period of time. If Gmail returns 5XX then that tells the sending MTA that retry delivery will fail, however, that doesn't mean that the human who receives the DSN (aka bounce message) cannot read the reason for the failure, figure out the problem, and resend it.

Accordingly, not all types of failures are the same and not all 5XX mean that the address should never be used again. For example, if someone attaches a 100MB zip file to an email and sends it to Gmail it will be permanently rejected with a 5XX level error due to size. Does this mean that the recipient email address should not ever be used again? What it means is that if the sender tries again to send a 100MB message it won't work. There are numerous reasons for 5XX type error messages, none of which mean "never send an email to this address ever again".

Keep in mind that we're talking about "working" email addresses. They work everywhere else but with LCR. We know that the addresses are legitimate and do not result in 5XX failures in general because the member is actively using them with other communicants. It's not like members have signed up for their Church accounts using email addresses that are bogus and would result in eternal 5XX failures. Even if the Church has a policy of automatically suppressing delivery to addresses that receive a 5XX failure, for whatever reason, they should at least offer an option to the members to remove their email address from purgatory. This could be a button in the Church Account pages.

While Gmail is really the worst for email problems among all the big providers, I don't believe at all that Gmail has selectively decided to permanently reject emails from some Church members for failures that resulted from temporary or otherwise transient reasons. I think it's more ilkely that the problem exists elsewhere.

Unfortunately, what we're dealing with in these discussions are 2 large organizations (3 if you include Amazon SES) which have made it difficult to communicate with their patrons which doesn't make it easy to resolve problems. Has any "customer" of Gmail ever contacted Gmail and asked them if they are blocking communications sent from the Church to their email address? What was the response? I've contacted the Church via GSD about why the messages are being rejected and I have gotten no straight answer, only misdirections (check your mailbox size, check that mail.churchofjesuschrist.org is whitelisted, check this, check that), but nobody has ever given me a positive confirmation (or denial) that my email address is not on the Church's Amazon SES suppression list.

I mentioned this before [not sure if in this thread or another], but be sure to send LCR messages using DIFFERENT SUBJECT lines for each message.

Blasting out a weekly email with subject "Ward Bulletin" will quickly run into issues with Outlook/Hotmail [& others?] where the message doesn't hit the recipient's Inbox or Spam box. It's silently dropped somewhere along the line. However requesting the clerk send with a subject like "Ward Bulletin 1/25/2025", "Ward Bulletin 2/1/2025" -- something different between LCR emails has effectively resolved the issue for my Hotmail account.

In the case of gmail, something users can try is add a plus sign to their email. So, instead of "JDoe", use "JDoe+lds". There's a fair chance it will be seen as a different email address by any blacklist, but Google ignores everything after the plus sign and will deliver it to the same email box.