Page 1 of 1

Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:06 am
by lfura
Hello. I just went to use the Send a Message functionality from within the Leader Clerk Resources section of the website to send out a notice regarding funeral arrangements for a member from our stake. Unfortunately most the recipients did not receive the message. It looks as if the church website attempted to use my yahoo.com email address as the from email address. Which resulted in most of the messages being rejected by the receiving email servers. Shortly after sending the email from the LCR website I received a Mail Delivery Subsystem message which offered many different errors:

Emails to aol.com domain had the following result: reason: 521 5.2.1 : (DMARC:F1) This message failed DMARC Evaluation and is being refused due to the policy provided by the From domain.

Emails to gmail.com domains had the following result: reason: 550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to domain's

Emails to microsoft domains (live.com, hotmail.com, msn.com etc) had the following result: reason: 550 5.7.0 (BAY004-MC2F4) Unfortunately, messages from (216.49.179.112) on behalf of (yahoo.com) could not be delivered due to domain owner policy restrictions.

Emails to yahoo.com domains had the following result: reason: 554 5.7.9 Message not accepted for policy reasons. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-28.html

I believe this is a result of the church website using my personal yahoo.com email address as the from email address for the email. It would be better to have the emails originate from the church with a donotreply@lds.org email account or something along that line. You could simply append a statement at the top of the email stating who initialed the email and their personal email address if people wish to respond.

As a work around I exported the ward list and concatenate the member email addresses together to be comma separated and sent out the email directly from yahoo.com with the members blind carbon copied which worked properly and resulted in only a couple of kick back emails stating that the members email address was wrong which would be expected.

The idea of the "send a message" feature is nice but based on how it is currently being implemented it is useless as the receiving email provider servers are rejecting the messages because they do not originate from the domain they are stating to be from since you are using the members personal email address as the from email address.

Thank you!

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:21 am
by drepouille
Have you submitted your suggestion using the Feedback link at the bottom of the page on lds.org? This is simply a user forum.

I was under the impression that all export ability had been removed from both MLS and LCR, but I could be wrong.

Another way to capture e-mail addresses for such a broadcast is to use the "Email all Adults" link at the top of the Adults section of Ward Organizations in the Directory. This will allow you to copy all addresses into your email client. The additional benefit of using the Directory rather than LCR might be that the privacy wishes of the members are respected, since only those with stake visibility will be shown.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:48 am
by lfura
Hello Dana. Thank you for the suggestion of using the feedback link. I will do that.

In regards to the export capabilities I could not find it under LCR but just under the plain directory I have an option to "Export Households" which is what I used (it may be based on my calling that I have this option available, not really sure).

But thank you also for pointing out the Email All Adults option under ward organizations because I did not know that existed. That was a simpler solution than what I had to do in excel with the comma delimited export.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 9:40 am
by scgallafent
We are aware of the DMARC issues and are working on a solution.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 9:57 am
by sbradshaw
Gmail automatically converts line breaks to commas when you paste a bunch of emails in; it's possible that Yahoo does something similar.

An alternative way to make a list of email addresses comma-separated is pasting them all in a text document, then doing a find and replace to replace line breaks with commas.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:03 am
by lfura
Hello Samuel. I am all good,I was able to get my email out using yahoo directly by simply concatenating the email addresses together with comma's within excel. I just wanted to make sure the church was aware that they had a bigger issue going on with the "send a message" function built in to the leader clerk resources section of the site. Which based on the above response by scgallafent who is listed as a church employee it looks as if they are aware and working on a solution.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:08 am
by jdlessley
lfura wrote:I just went to use the Send a Message functionality from within the Leader Clerk Resources section of the website to send out a notice regarding funeral arrangements for a member from our stake. Unfortunately most the recipients did not receive the message. It looks as if the church website attempted to use my yahoo.com email address as the from email address.
This has always been the way the Send a message feature has worked when the message is sent from within LCR. It has also been known for over a year or more that email service providers have adopted DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policies. This began with Yahoo and was quickly adopted by other email service providers. Because of email service providers' DMARC policies the Directory mail feature was changed so that a user could only copy the addressee list and paste into the user's email client.

The Send a message feature in LCR has the same capability to copy addressee lists and paste into your email client. This is the best way to avoid DMARC policies from rejecting messages. After selecting the group you want to send the message, click "View All" on the right side of the list of addressees. Then highlight the list and copy the addressees and past the list into your email client. Just make sure the email addresses are pasted into the Bcc field instead of the To field, or Recipients field, to maintain privacy for those members whose addresses are private.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 11:10 am
by russellhltn
scgallafent wrote:We are aware of the DMARC issues and are working on a solution.
Would this do it?

From: noreply@lds.org
Reply to: personal email.

Re: Send a Message should originate from church email address

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 11:24 am
by scgallafent
russellhltn wrote:From: noreply@lds.org
Reply to: personal email.
That needs to be done, among other things.