cvhansen wrote:I tried to sent out a mail over this system.
I have sent out INFORMATION on when there is General Conf. Satellite transmissions available to view fin our meetinghouse.
Manny didn't arrive.
Can anybody explain why the Church set forth a system there does not work?
Why do the Church not, as a ORG, provide a mail system for all members, >12 years of age, with their member no as mailbox - addition to that there could be created mailboxes connected to functions like stake presidents branch presidents etc. with forwarding to the personal mail account
This also could help solve some of the issues with members not allowing others to see the personal mail addresses, since these are now property of the Church not personal anymore.
If it doesn't work, it may not be the church's system that isn't working. If some are delivered and other's aren't delivered, the church's system is likely doing its part and sending it -- the receiving end may just be blocking it.
Email is complex because of spam. All providers such as gmail, hotmail, etc, filter email. They have to train their systems to try to detect spam. All of them do it differently which is probably why some emails are delivered and others aren't delivered. Also, the words/vocabulary IN the email can cause an email to be flagged as spam. Many of these providers' systems use a scoring system to determine if an email is spam. When an email server sends out one email to a large amount of recipients, that increases the score.
Now, imagine some bad person wants to send a lot of spam and they want to put lds.org as the FROM address on their emails. Yes, they can forge it. This can increase a score. There are ways an organization like the church can try to prove their emails are legitimate such as SPF records so that receiving servers can verify that the server sending the email really is lds.org and not a bad person. This would lower the score.
Sadly, because every system is different it is hard to make generalizations. My gmail system may work just fine because I have trained it to allow the emails. Others may be doing the opposite and flagging all church emails as spam -- thus training the gmail system to flag them as spam.
It would be a large effort to maintain an email system for all church members and it would be even harder to get them to use it. People use what they are used to. I help support a school and it took a solid good push to get the teachers to stop using personal email addresses and to use the school email addresses. It would be too hard to work against the moment of millions of members and which email system they want to use.
For those not getting the emails, they should do a few things:
1. Check their spam folder. If it's in there, tell the email system that it isn't spam. Gmail has an option to highlight and click NOT SPAM.
2. Add a filter that is specific to the church's sending address (lds.org or whatever it is) to make sure it goes INTO the inbox. This is like a whitelist.
3. Some email providers will whitelist any email address in their addressbook (this isn't true for all systems). If the church is using a consistent, standard email address you could try that.
4. A person could look up any specifics for their email provider to see how to whitelist an email sender.