tonynocchi wrote: Thu May 08, 2025 7:54 am
One of the members of the Ward Council is my wife and I am checking her spam folder and it's definitely not going there.
This is where it would be extremely useful if LCR were to record and publish in the confirmation email the SMTP acceptance message information returned by the SMTP server when it accepts an email. Then if a message cannot be tracked down, you could at least work with the iSP who accepted the message and ask
them where it went.
For example, when I sent an email to someone, Gmail sent back the following response when it accepted the email for delivery:
Code:
250 2.0.0 OK 1740537858 00932257fa632-6ef1ca0384ksl264960c3.93 - gsmtp
If the message ever disappeared, I could contact the sender and have them ask their ISP to look up this information in their records to tell him where the message ended up. If the ISP isn't able to assist then I would suggest to get a new ISP that cares more about delivering legitimate emails than it does about censoring them.
Additionally, RFC 5321 specifically recommends that when a server accepts a message that it is a "serious" matter:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.1
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-6.2
When ISPs get in the habit of disappearing email, it makes the entire email system unreliable (which is contrary to the stated goal of being a reliable delivery mechanism). ISPs that do so make things worse than the problem they are trying to solve. So too, by the way, does an opaque system like LCR's message confirmation subsystem, so the Church doesn't exactly have a clean house in this regard either.
tonynocchi wrote: Thu May 08, 2025 7:54 am
I am receiving confirmation emails that these messages are going out.
In other words, you are receiving the confirmation email from LCR that includes emails that were explicitly rejected by the server and her (your wife's) address is not on that list?
If it's not on that list, and given that we don't have any other superior information as alluded to above, we can only assume that the message was in fact accepted by her ISP and put into a SPAM folder or disappeared (rare but does happen sometimes). You should start by asking her ISP what happened to an email that was sent to her address at the exact time that it was sent, obviously working on the assumption that the Church did in fact send it. If they say that they have no record of receiving an email at that time, then that would point to a problem somewhere in LCR.
tonynocchi wrote: Thu May 08, 2025 7:54 am
if one person gets a message, everyone does and if one person doesn't get a message, no one else gets it either.
All of the recipients except one are using Gmail and the one-off is using Hotmail.
Are you saying that
all of the recipients listed in the LCR message get it or all fail to get it? Or are you saying that of all the recipients listed, a subset of those recipients all succeed or fail together in receiving the message?
tonynocchi wrote: Thu May 08, 2025 10:07 am
So after some testing, it appears to fail significantly more (if not 100% of the time) when you select the checkbox to "Allow recipients to "reply to all".
When you say "fail" in this context you mean that zero of the recipients are able to find the message in any of their folders or any SPAM folder? Or do you mean there's an actual rejection somewhere that indicates failure?
Unfortunately I don't have that option (reply to all) available to me to test so I cannot answer my own curiosity regarding the difference between such messages. Do you receive the same emails that your wife does not? Would you be willing to post headers of an example of each (one with and one without "reply to all") so that we can reason about what differences might be causing trouble in the delivery of the messages? You can obscure sensitive pieces of information if that helps.
I imagine one difference with "reply to all" is that all recipients are listed in either To or Cc headers. Perhaps the number of recipients is a red flag to those Gmail recipients? One would think that a company with as much money and resources as Google should be able to handle any amount of legitimate email, but perhaps they have an agenda. At any rate, this FAQ has some interesting implications:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/ ... nding-mail
It suggests that they may limit the number of recipients in a single email to 500, and while I doubt this is what's happening unless you are sending to the entire Stake, it's a possibility. One way that the Church could get around this is to setup a special return email address and use that as a To recipient when the "reply to all" function is enabled. This special return email address would essentially work like a mailing list (perhaps with a cryptographically secure timestamp embedded in the email address that keeps the use of that address to a short timeframe). Then when a member replies, the response would be directed to this special email address which would behave like a distribution list or traditional mailing list. Yes, I know this kind of feature would require a non-trivial amount of engineering effort.