Still not getting official church emails

Hello All, It has been at least eleven months since I have not been able to receive stake or ward emails. I use Gmail. My son who lives with me receives them but I do not. He is not active and does not check his emails routinely to forward them to me. I have tried working with my ward clerk and the stake clerk to no avail. I've even tried Church hq to no avail. I'm pulling my hair out over this. This is extremely frustrating since I am the admin of our social media accounts but don't get the announcements of events, members who have passed away, meetings, etc.

I have tried everything the clerks and HQ have told me to do, but yet the issue remains.

I sure would appreciate any suggestions!

Sadly, you're not along in not receiving email message from the 'Send a Message' facility. Using a different email provider _MIGHT_ help but is no guarantee. Please see these threads for some of the existing discussion on the subject:

viewtopic.php?t=41120

viewtopic.php?t=22771&start=550

Those are some rather old threads. Either the problem has been largely solved, or people gave up complaining.

I use gmail and got a message just 3 days ago sent via LCR, so it's clearly not universal.

The first thing is to make sure your subscriptions are set correctly in https://account.churchofjesuschrist.org

The "Local Leader Email" was added not that long ago and when it appeared, it was unchecked. I'm not sure if that's because it's the default, or because I jumped in before it was fully implemented.

Thank you for your replies. However, everything that needs to be checked, is checked. I used to have AOL and found that certain email providers were having the same issue so I changed out my AOL for my Gmail account and it worked for a short period of time. Then all of a sudden I was not receiving official emails again.

I wonder why it worked and then stopped working.

I did go into my contacts a few months ago and added the lcr address but that didn't work either.

I've asked my ward clerk and Bishop to email me from their own email address or text me for anything important. They usually don't remember though.

Since there hasn't appeared to be anything reliable that a member can do to ensure that they get leader emails, I'd suggest that in a situation like yours, the local leaders should take the lead. Ideally, if they are using the tool to send out information, they should be willing to accommodate members who are not getting them. Unfortunately, it's quite possible that they won't be responsive to this member request, as it seems you're seeing. Perhaps you could encourage your local leaders to do a member survey and determine how many members are also not getting the emails they assume everyone is getting. If they find that there's others in the same boat as you, that might encourage them to manually send out additional emails.

Another point you could bring up with local leaders is that many members do not use email regularly (granted, you may have had these discussions already). Since you're the manager of the social media outreach, it seems like at the very least any leader using the tool to send emails, should also be directly communicating with you to ensure the same info gets blasted out through other means.

But if the leaders are not responsive, then based on what you've stated you've already tried, there's not much else anyone can do.

If your son is willing, he might be able to set up a forwarding rule that automatically forwards emails from the Church to you.

I'll speak to the Bishop about this issue because you are right, there may be others that aren't get church emails.

That's a good idea to see if my son can automatically get the church emails forwarded to me.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions! I appreciate all of your suggestions.

katiescarlett71 wrote: Wed Sep 18, 2024 3:26 pm I'll speak to the Bishop about this issue because you are right, there may be others that aren't get church emails.

Unfortunately there's likely very little that the Bishop can do except perhaps give you an estimate of how many are not receiving them in your ward or perhaps escalate your request to the Stake president, who in turn might be able to escalate it further up the chain until it gets to someone who has the authority to direct change. This is one thing I have yet to try. Given that your email address is legitimate and working (as in it works everywhere else but LCR), your email address has most likely ended up on the Church's email blacklist maintained in Amazon SES:

viewtopic.php?t=45138

You might try calling Global Services Department and ask them if they can remove your email address from the Church's Amazon SES suppression list for mail.churchofjesuschrist.org.

God Bless

BrianEdwards wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2024 7:51 am the local leaders should take the lead. Ideally, if they are using the tool to send out information, they should be willing to accommodate members who are not getting them.

In my ward, the assistant executive secretary has thankfully started to forward messages to those who don't get them as mentioned in the LCR failure report that is delivered to him.

katiescarlett71 wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2024 4:33 am I wonder why it worked and then stopped working.

Because the tool (Amazon SES) that the Church uses for sending out emails from LCR likely has an overly sensitive configuration for the email address suppression list that will automatically blacklist your email address if there is some failure in delivering to that address. If your address is listed, there is currently no way to have it removed (at least none that I have found or has been mentioned in this forum). You can switch email addresses or switch providers, but as you have discovered, that only works temporarily until the next unexpected failure causes your address to get blocked again.

katiescarlett71 wrote: Wed Sep 18, 2024 3:31 pm Thank you everyone for your suggestions! I appreciate all of your suggestions.

Given that you're using Gmail, there's another suggestion made in a similar thread that you might utilize if you don't mind changing email addresses all the time:

russellhltn wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2025 8:43 pm In the case of gmail, something users can try is add a plus sign to their email. So, instead of "JDoe", use "JDoe+lds".

viewtopic.php?p=256345#p256345