Not receiving Emails from Ward and Stake

My "Tools" application is set to Stake permissions on all household and personal contact information. We are not receiving emails from our Ward or Stake when information is sent. Our Ward Clerk sent a test message and we received it, but later when the weekly group newsletter went out for our Ward, we did not receive it. What can be done to fix this problem?

khunsaker wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 11:36 am What can be done to fix this problem?

You might want to contact your email provider to see if there's anything that can be done on their end.

Do you have your email address filled in under both the household and personal email fields? This is necessary even if it's the same – some tools pull from one field, others pull from the other.

I was able to receive emails via LCR without any trouble until I became ward executive secretary two weeks ago and I gained access to LCR, after never having had access to it before. Since then, I haven't been able to receive any emails from anyone, including myself, and I can't send emails to anyone. My stake clerk doesn't know why. Can someone help me? I have a Yahoo email account. It's the same account I was using when I was able to receive emails prior to two weeks ago. I get the green indicator saying the message is sending, as well, but then I receive no confirmation, and no one, including myself, receives the email. I can't receive emails from any of the other ward leaders, either. I'm missing out on everything and having to ask others to send emails for me.

cgiddley wrote: Mon Jul 25, 2022 6:04 pm I was able to receive emails via LCR without any trouble until I became ward executive secretary two weeks ago and I gained access to LCR, after never having had access to it before. Since then, I haven't been able to receive any emails from anyone, including myself, and I can't send emails to anyone. My stake clerk doesn't know why. Can someone help me? I have a Yahoo email account. It's the same account I was using when I was able to receive emails prior to two weeks ago. I get the green indicator saying the message is sending, as well, but then I receive no confirmation, and no one, including myself, receives the email. I can't receive emails from any of the other ward leaders, either. I'm missing out on everything and having to ask others to send emails for me.

This sounds very much like the problem reported almost a year ago in this thread: https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/fo ... hp?t=39444

Indeed, we are getting reports in our ward that no one with a yahoo.com account can receive email from LCR. It appears that it is a fairly recent change, as emails were received by these members on July 10, but not after that date.

And to verify it myself, I temporarily changed my email address for my Church account to an ancient yahoo.com account I don't use anymore. Using LCR to send emails to that account seemed to work, but the messages never got to my yahoo inbox. There was no message on the sending side in LCR to indicate that there was a failure. My guess is that the yahoo.com mail servers are receiving the email, but treating the noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org address as a spammer, so they don't send a response, but they also don't forward it on to the member's mailbox.

Members with these problematic accounts can try to work with Yahoo to request that they allow emails from noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org, but that could take a while or Yahoo may choose not to do it. In any case, if they have an alternate email with a different provider, they can switch to that email on their Church account. I know that can be painful, but it should work immediately.

Thanks for the feedback. But I have to wonder why -- if the issue is Yahoo -- can I not SEND emails via LCR to anyone in the ward?

I called Yahoo this evening, and the agent I spoke to said Yahoo is not blocking emails sent by noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org from being received by Yahoo email users. He pointed out that since our tech forum users are reporting that emails are not currently being received by at least three email providers -- Yahoo, AOL and Comcast -- the issue must reside with whoever manages noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org.

I also wonder whether my email issue might be connected with me having had access to MLS until 2015 in a previous calling, and then not having had leader access rights to anything until July 10, when I gained access rights to LCR. Could there be some cached user info connected with my access rights to MLS that are in conflict with my access rights to LCR? For example, several times since July 10 when I've clicked on the "Leader and Clerk Resources" URL, I've gotten a notification saying I don't have rights to access that page. Sometimes Leader and Clerk Resources then loads within a few seconds, but a few times, I've had to log back in to my Church website account. Also, every time I've clicked on the "Contact Us" icon on the far right side of the LCR screen, an antiquated-looking sign-in screen pops up, asking for my user name and password, and then it disappears after about a second, and then I get a mostly blank white page with a notice that says I've been successfully logged out.

cgiddley wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:47 pm I called Yahoo this evening, and the agent I spoke to said Yahoo is not blocking emails sent by noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org from being received by Yahoo email users. He pointed out that since our tech forum users are reporting that emails are not currently being received by at least three email providers -- Yahoo, AOL and Comcast -- the issue must reside with whoever manages noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org.

Since 2017, Yahoo and AOL are owned and managed by the same company. I couldn't find a lot of information online about Comcast email, but I suspect that Comcast/Xfinity is also connected to Yahoo and AOL (note how Yahoo and AOL are called out here, with no mention of other big providers like Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/add-external-email-accounts-to-xfinity-connect).

Gmail gets mixed results for messages I send. Some get blocked, others get through fine.
Don't think I've had any issues with hotmail/outlook.

cgiddley wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:47 pm I called Yahoo this evening, and the agent I spoke to said Yahoo is not blocking emails sent by noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org from being received by Yahoo email users. He pointed out that since our tech forum users are reporting that emails are not currently being received by at least three email providers -- Yahoo, AOL and Comcast -- the issue must reside with whoever manages noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org.

TO THE FORUM MODERATORS HERE:
has this issue been communicated to official church technology leaders or is this just a bunch of us commiserating that church notifications no longer works for Yahoo users?

The official answer can’t be “just create a new address with a new provider.”

mattprasmussen wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 9:17 am

cgiddley wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:47 pm I called Yahoo this evening, and the agent I spoke to said Yahoo is not blocking emails sent by noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org from being received by Yahoo email users. He pointed out that since our tech forum users are reporting that emails are not currently being received by at least three email providers -- Yahoo, AOL and Comcast -- the issue must reside with whoever manages noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org.

TO THE FORUM MODERATORS HERE:
has this issue been communicated to official church technology leaders or is this just a bunch of us commiserating that church notifications no longer works for Yahoo users?

The official answer can’t be “just create a new address with a new provider.”

The most reliable way to get feedback to those who oversee Church tech products is to use the Feedback link at the bottom of the Church website. This is primarily a user-to-user forum, and with a few exceptions, the forum moderators don't have a direct line of communication to those who make decisions or can provide an official response. That said, in another thread about emails not coming through it was confirmed that the developers are aware of the issue.

mattprasmussen wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 9:17 am The official answer can’t be “just create a new address with a new provider.”

No, that's not the official answer. I'm just pointing out options that are within your power to use.

I have also been experiencing this issue since July 7th. I have tested with yahoo.com, @gmail.com, and @hotmail.com and the only one not working is yahoo.com. However I believe the email is no reply-lcr@churchofjesuschrist.org that is not coming through.

Our ward has also had issues with yahoo email accounts not receiving what is sent out through LCR. However, we've had another error pop up, aid it says "the recipients were rejected by the server". We've verified email addresses, and everything is correct. What should I try?

for the "rejected" ones, try sending them from your personal email directly (make sure to use Blind Carbon Copy if sending to groups). We have a few gmail accounts that do the "rejected" thing when sending through LCR but work when sending from our email directly.

I have the same issue. In my case it doesn't involve a yahoo account. My email address is set at the individual level in member tools and set to be visible to everyone. I'm also a ward exec sec and a technologist by trade.

I believe the issue relates to defects in the church email broadcast tool used by ward and stake leaders.

This article speaks about known defects when attachments are involved.
https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/fo ... hp?t=36745

I've found the best way to resolve this and prior email defects is to have another person in the ward forward the missing email as an attachment. Then get that attachment to your email provider so they can see how they can compensate.

Best of luck

We have done a number of tests. In our ward, any emails sent through LCR's "Send a Message" portal to a yahoo.com, verizon.net, or hotmail.com address are not being sent. The only workaround we have found is to make a list of all ward members with one of these addresses and then BCC forward any email sent through LCR directly to those email addresses through another portal (e.g., gmail.com). Hopefully, this will be resolved soon but it is not yet clear to me that the church tech group is aware of this problem.

cgcrandall wrote: Fri Nov 04, 2022 8:49 pm ...but it is not yet clear to me that the church tech group is aware of this problem.

In other threads on this issue, it is clear that church tech is aware and working on it. Apparently the problem is these providers have labeled the church Send A Message tool as a spammer. From what I have read on the forum, it appears the best thing we can do to help is work to ensure all email addresses in membership records are valid and avoid sending emails to those who don't what them (if members are marking emails they don't want as spam to their ISP, it won't help efforts to get the church's name cleared).

I did report the problem via the Feedback button on the main landing page for the Church website. Their response was:
"More information here. Gmail seems to be working for now.
https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/fo ... hp?t=40836"

This doesn't sound like they are trying to address the problem.

djhardingdj wrote: Wed Nov 16, 2022 1:55 pm This doesn't sound like they are trying to address the problem.

The Global Services Department does not address these problems, and that is one of their standard answers. But I can assure you that the developers are working on it.

Any progress on this? My wife and I have had this same problem for over a year. I have a Gmail address and she has yahoo.

drepasi wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 6:49 am Any progress on this? My wife and I have had this same problem for over a year. I have a Gmail address and she has yahoo.

This post provides more information regarding what the church is dealing with: https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/fo ... 00#p237500 Ward/Branch councils can help by cleaning up email addresses for members in their unit, especially those who are less active. All leaders can all help by using email communications responsibly and respecting the wishes of individual members who desire less (or no) contact via email.

Prior to taking on the role of ward executive secretary two weeks ago and gaining access to LCR for the first time, I had no issues receiving emails via LCR. Since then, I haven't been able to send or receive emails from anyone or anything, not even from myself. My stake clerk is baffled as to why. Can anyone assist me?
I use Yahoo for my email. I was using the same account when I could receive emails before two weeks ago. I also see the green bar that indicates that the message is sending, but I don't get a confirmation and nobody, not even myself, receives the email. No other ward leaders can email me, and neither can I. I'm losing out on everything and am dependent on others to send my emails.

SABadshah wrote: Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:12 am Prior to taking on the role of ward executive secretary two weeks ago and gaining access to LCR for the first time, I had no issues receiving emails via LCR. Since then, I haven't been able to send or receive emails from anyone or anything, not even from myself. ...
I use Yahoo for my email.

I'm surprised it worked that well.

A couple of things: This has been going on for months. A resolution between the church and Yahoo in a time frame you can live with is unlikely. The best course of action is to use a email that's not associated with Yahoo, AOL, or Verizon.

There are a few things you can look at to see if it made things worse: Make sure to remove all invalid emails from the system. Some units have modified the email to avoid sending to members who have requested no emails, but results in sending a bunch of invalid addresses to the email provider which ticks them off.

The other part is some recipients may not appreciate the email and is marking it as spam.

I am not receiving email from the Stake and ward Relief Society, nor am I receiving email from the high councilor over my position. I did get email from these people two years ago and now nothing. Can somebody help?

If you have a yahoo, aol, or verizon related email address it's a known issue that the church is working on fixing. If you're with a different email provider, check that your individual (not household) email address on your membership record is correct.

My email account is with Hotmail, not the ones you suggested.

gr3yb3ar wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2022 4:46 pm My email account is with Hotmail, not the ones you suggested.

Other then checking your spam folder or considering moving to a different provider, there's not much that can be done by you or the local leadership,.

What can be done is making sure all emails are valid. Make sure someone hasn't been editing to the emails to avoid sending to users who have requested not to get emails from the ward.

What email domains are working?

wrigjef wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 12:36 pm What email domains are working?

Gmail has been working for me, but some have reported problems with it. It's possible that Gmail is doing a better job of containing/limiting the impact to just individual wards or something.

Does anything other than gmail work?

My zoho email received “send a message” emails just fine before these problems. Checked with zoho and they looked at logs and nothing has changed on their end. I was on a stake communications committee and have a churchofjesuschrist.org email that I use on my church account so I can receive messages but I was released and they will likely take that email address away. I would rather not set up a gmail account.

wrigjef wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 5:23 pm Does anything other than gmail work?

My zoho email received “send a message” emails just fine before these problems. Checked with zoho and they looked at logs and nothing has changed on their end. I was on a stake communications committee and have a churchofjesuschrist.org email that I use on my church account so I can receive messages but I was released and they will likely take that email address away. I would rather not set up a gmail account.

Based on a report I just ran, we have 49 unique email domains, used by members in the stake.
From what I can tell, 23 are "free" email services, 12 are ISP provided, with the rest a combination of custom and workplace.
And although there are 23 free, that includes 4 different yahoo domains, 9 different Microsoft-owned domains etc.
And of those 12 ISP domains, I think it's only actually four different companies

It's difficult to know who is affected all together. I get some bounces for yahoo email addresses. But others are silent delivery fails. The aol domain is usually ok from memory.

Would be so much easier if I could put a tracking pixel in the emails.

Has any one been able to get this resolved without having to get a Gmail account? I have reported this in the feedback link. I seems like something happened in July as that was the last time any of us received an email from our ward.

If it's a yahoo address there is nothing we can do about it, except have leaders send to yahoo addresses manually using their own email client.

So what I’m reading here is that we don’t know what email domains work, other than gmail.

wrigjef wrote: Sat Dec 31, 2022 4:32 pm So what I’m reading here is that we don’t know what email domains work, other than gmail.

If you read through the posts you will note that there is a short list of domains that do not work. Others seem to work. Gmail is not the only one that usually gets through.

I’m almost certainly missing something but from what I can read Looks like yahoo, AOL, Verizon & Comcast are definitely not working. Hotmail doesn’t work for some, even gmail isn’t working consistently.

When I was provided a @comm.churchofjesuschrist.org email address, I added it to my Apple mail client and it looked like it’s gmail based. I’ll just hope that the church lets me keep that email after I’m released from my communications calling so I can use it for my entry in the ward directory, and continue to receive send a message emails.

I do thank you for your help. This forum is always very helpful.

After having just spoken with Leader Support they let me know that AOL and YAHOO have completely blocked all emails from the Church due to Less Active or Inactive Members who received Church Communications be it at the General, Stake or Ward Levels who do no wish to receive such communications have been marking the messages as spam or junk instead of replying to the messages and asking the Sender to remove them from the list.

Furthermore AOL and YAHOO have shared these Block Lists with other major email providers and as a result emails sent to Hotmail or Comcast etc are also being effected.

Gmail or Google Workspace Emails are not effected and it was recommended to me to ask the members who are effected to at least temporarily use a gmail account in order to continue to receive regular, uninterrupted communications.

Finally when looking at Send a Message inside of LCR the following banner message is appearing which has reinforced everything that I was just told over the phone.

"The Church’s email delivery via “Send a Message” in Leader and Clerk Resources has been problematic for the past several weeks. Some email providers are currently blocking email traffic from Church servers.

Church engineers are actively working on the problem both internally, with external vendors and email providers. There appears to be no “quick fix” for the issue and may continue for some time. For the best probability of not being blocked, we recommend:

Email messages sent via “Send a Message” be sent during the week instead of near peak hours of Saturday and Sunday.
Members verify that the email addresses on their Church account are correct.
Thank you for your patience as we work through email delivery problems."

I hope this information helps anyone who is helping members struggling with similar issues.

Not being disrespectful but I’m wondering if the whole “blocking” issue is real. My zoho.com email worked fine for several years then inexplicably stopped getting church emails. I’ve talked to several different people at zoho and they all tell the same story, they don’t block emails (users set their own spam filters), they don’t buy block lists from other providers and they have not adjusted anything.

I'm fairly certain that churchofjesuschrist.org email is gmail based. I’m wondering if church members are being prompted to also use gmail.

wrigjef wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2023 3:13 pm I'm fairly certain that churchofjesuschrist.org email is gmail based. I’m wondering if church members are being prompted to also use gmail.

Missionary emails are Gmail-based (missionary.org); however, most other things at the Church (including employee emails) are Microsoft/Outlook-based. I don't know what system is being used for mass emails, but I would be surprised if it's a Gmail-based system.

When I was assigned a churchofjesuschrist.org email for a previous communications calling, my email client classified it as a google account with a gmail alias.

wrigjef wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2023 3:13 pm Not being disrespectful but I’m wondering if the whole “blocking” issue is real.

I think it's more likely that church practice doesn't meet internet expectorations (lack of opt out and bad emails not being removed from the list). At some point, the email providers stop working with the sender and just black list them.

I remember when Send a Message started, the church tried to spoof the sender's email rather than using "Reply to".

It's also quite possible that the first tier support at zoho doesn't know what filtering might be taking place. If there was none at all you'd probably have more "Nigerian prince" emails than valid ones.

aebrown wrote: Mon Jul 25, 2022 8:10 pm My guess is that the yahoo.com mail servers are receiving the email, but treating the noreply@churchofjesuschrist.org address as a spammer, so they don't send a response, but they also don't forward it on to the member's mailbox.

I believe that the problem is not Yahoo, but rather that the Church has an internal blacklist of email addresses and that once your email address is on this list, LCR doesn't even attempt to deliver a message, while at the same time sending back a message to the LCR sender that the message was "rejected by the server", when in fact, there wasn't even a delivery attempted. Yahoo cannot reject an email that it doesn't even receive.

We have not been receiving emails from our ward and stake for some time now.
We have talked to the ward clerk and the stake clerk, who neither can understand why: told to get a new email.
We were given a phone number to call, no solutions after several attempts, just get a new email.
Now our wards and stakes in our area are changing boundaries, etc. and we don’t know about any meetings, etc. except by hearsay and neighbors.
Previous communications via email have worked for years.
Feeling out of touch …

First off, go to account.churchofjesuschrist.org, on the left side, click "Subscriptions". Make sure "Local Leader Email" is checked.

If that's checked, and the correct email is in the directory, I don't think there's anything more in your power or the power of anyone you can contact to fix it.

I see you're using a Hotmail address. I think @hotmail.com and @outlook.com are one in the same. If true, then you can change your church account to say @outlook.com so that it seems like you've changed your address when you haven't. That may get around the issue.

As far as missing meetings, hopefully the leadership is using the calendar system for anything outside of normal Sunday meetings. You can access the calendar via the web page, Member Tools, and even sync selected calendars to your personal device. For regular meetings, you can use the Meetinghouse Locator to see what ward covers your address and what time they meet. (Although it may take some time to sync up with changes.)

bhornberger wrote: Sun Apr 20, 2025 1:01 pm We have not been receiving emails from our ward and stake for some time now.

First, check that the "Local Leader Email" option is checked in your subscriptions in your Church account:
Then make sure your ISP or email provider isn't blocking the Church's emails (unlikely, but a possibility).

Most likely your email has ended up on the Church's account level suppression list with Amazon SES. Please contact Global Services Department and ask them to see if your email address is on this list and then to have it removed from the list. Keep in mind that the main GSD contact will not have the ability to remove your address from the list---and may not even be aware of this blacklist---so you may have to go multiple rounds and ask for it to be escalated to an engineer. Also, be patient, this process can take a long time.

For more details, see:

viewtopic.php?t=45138

For Global Services Department numbers see the wiki:

https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/wi ... Department