Tech Forum

I am trying to acquaint my stake leaders with the "Send a Message" feature in Clerk Resources and have some questions. Which email address does the feature use from MLS, Household or Individual? And does the privacy settings in the Directory have any effect on the Send a Message in Clerk Resources?

zaneclark wrote:I am trying to acquaint my stake leaders with the "Send a Message" feature in Clerk Resources and have some questions. Which email address does the feature use from MLS, Household or Individual? And does the privacy settings in the Directory have any effect on the Send a Message in Clerk Resources?

The Individual email address is used (the Household email address is not used, even if it is present and the Individual email address is blank).

Yes, privacy settings affect the Send a Message features. See the thread "Send A Message" only works for those with "Stake Visibility".

UPDATE: my claim that the household email address is not used in the case where the individual email address is blank is sometimes false, but sometimes true. See my later post.

aebrown wrote:The Individual email address is used (the Household email address is not used, even if it is present and the Individual email address is blank).

My experience leads me to believe your statement is incorrect. I just tested this by going to Send a Message and putting my daughter's name in the Recipient(s) list. My daughter does not have an individual email address on her record, but she was added to the Recipient(s) list with our household email address.

subtlecoolness wrote:My experience leads me to believe your statement is incorrect. I just tested this by going to Send a Message and putting my daughter's name in the Recipient(s) list. My daughter does not have an individual email address on her record, but she was added to the Recipient(s) list with our household email address.

I did do a test before posting that, and when I test that same individual with no individual email but a household email, the household email is not used. I've now tried at least a dozen individuals in the same situation, and in most cases the household address is used. But in a couple of them, it is not used. So I retract my absolute statement in the negative, but it doesn't appear that an absolute statement in the affirmative is correct, either.

I don't see any pattern regarding the individuals for whom the household email is not used. All I can say is "hmmmmm."

aebrown wrote:I don't see any pattern regarding the individuals for whom the household email is not used. All I can say is "hmmmmm."

I just surveyed one ward in our stake to get a feel for how widespread the issue is. This is obviously not a statistically significant sample, but for what it's worth, here's what I found:

• I examined all the adults in the ward who had no individual email address, but had a household address. That was 26 people.
• Of those 26 that I entered into the Send a Message feature on Leader Resources, 7 were rejected as having no email address. For the other 19, their household email address was used.
• In some of those 19 cases where the household address was used, the spouse had an individual email address that also worked.
• In some of the 7 failed cases, there was only one adult in the household; in some of the cases with two adults, the head of household failed, but in others the spouse failed. In no case did more than one individual in a household fail.
• I spot checked a few children with no individual email, and they always used the household address, but I didn't do an exhaustive survey (I only have so much patience for tedious tests!).
• In every case but one, the households and individuals concerned has their privacy settings set to "Stake Visibility." In that one case, the wife had an individual email address set to "Leadership Only", the household has an email, and the husband has no individual email; he is one of the failed cases. There's not enough data in this scenario to draw any conclusion.
• Every one of these individuals exhibited consistent behavior; I tried several of the the failed and succeeding cases multiple times in Send a Message, and each failed or succeeded consistently.

As you might infer from some of the points above, I had various theories as my testing proceeded as to what might distinguish these failed cases, but every theory was eliminated by the time I was done. I simply can see no pattern.

I assume you checked for the situation when one of the parents is a non-member? That seems to be a problematic situation.

RussellHltn wrote:I assume you checked for the situation when one of the parents is a non-member? That seems to be a problematic situation.

All of the households involved include only members.

Any pattern with other information - like phone numbers? I've had experiences in my programming where a test for one thing got re-used without properly adjusting the code. In this case, maybe the individual phone number was used as a test instead of the email.

RussellHltn wrote:Any pattern with other information - like phone numbers? I've had experiences in my programming where a test for one thing got re-used without properly adjusting the code. In this case, maybe the individual phone number was used as a test instead of the email.

Not that I can see. The cases that fail (and the cases that succeed) have a mix of having and not having individual phone numbers; same with household numbers.

RussellHltn wrote:Any pattern with other information - like phone numbers? I've had experiences in my programming where a test for one thing got re-used without properly adjusting the code. In this case, maybe the individual phone number was used as a test instead of the email.

It feels like an unordered SQL query designed to bring back both individual and household emails. Two results are returned. Either may or may not have an email address. The email code picks the first one returned in the result set and tries using it. Fix the query to bring back only non-empty values and order it such that individual is returned first.

Oh well, that's my guess