"Send a Message" Function on LCR

[russellhltn]

Yesterday, I received two copies of one message sent from a stake officer using LCR.

Huh. I had the same experience. I thought it was user error.

[ambldsorg]

Yesterday, I received two copies of one message sent from a stake officer using LCR. The only differences between the copies were in the header and the part boundary separator.

A couple of weeks ago, I got 10 copies of an email with this subject:

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Subject: Elder Patrick Kearon Shares Christ-Centered Principles in Temple

Except for some differences in Received headers, the messages were 100% identical (Message-Id, Return-Path, etc. were all identical) which suggests to me that the message was the same one just delivered repeatedly. The message must have eventually timed out in their mail queue because I noticed that the frequency of the deliveries increased between each message and it stopped after a period of time, however, I hope that this doesn't result in problems later on.

I suspect that there is a bug in the Marketo mailing platform that the Church uses.

[ambldsorg]

Huh. I had the same experience. I thought it was user error.

Actually, looking through my email from Sunday, I also got two copies of a message that our clerk sent out. It had an attachment. There are significant differences in the headers, but everything else is the same. For example, the Date headers differ by about a minute:

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-Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2026 04:06:20 +0000
+Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2026 04:07:55 +0000

But so do the Message-Id, Source-Message-Id, and Return-Path differ. The core content is the same.

I too initially thought it was just user error, maybe there's a bug in the mechanism that is submitting the LCR request (e.g. from the web it works fine, but maybe from a "smart" phone using an "app" it might be a bug).

[ambldsorg]

Actually, there being a new version is good news. We've been having problems with the old one not getting to some of the members it's being sent to.

As far as I can tell, only the UI and the way that the messages are formatted has changed. The email messages are still delivered using the same technology as before, so if you were having email delivery problems in your ward before, it isn't likely to change with this update. If you have members that are having trouble receiving emails that are sent from LCR, then they may need to work it out with GSD if they want to receive the messages.

[rgilgen]

Darn. I had been one that wasn't receiving messages until a couple of week ago, but now I do. So I thought maybe the problem was fixed.
I assume GSD is the Global Services Dept? I'll contact them.

[ambldsorg]

Darn. I had been one that wasn't receiving messages until a couple of week ago, but now I do. So I thought maybe the problem was fixed.

Well that's interesting. Perhaps as part of the update they decided to purge the Amazon SES account-level Suppression List which I believe has been the source of a lot of email delivery failures over the years. If you were one of those for which the "Message confirmation" that LCR would send back included a report for your email address stating:

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The recipients below were rejected by the server. Please verify
their email addresses.

and now you're receiving them without any action upon your part, then it's hopeful. Do you know of others in your ward that were observing similar errors? If so, it might be worth reaching out to them first before contacting GSD to see if they too are now receiving the emails that they previously were unable to receive.

[johnkirkham]

It looks like the Send a Message function has been updated and you can now "properly" format your message in the Message field. I know for a long time there were issues with formatting your message in this function (i.e. line spacing, etc.).

For those of you who copy and paste from another word processor, doing so might cause errors in your message once it's sent. For example, I used to copy and paste a message from Google Docs to get around the aforementioned formatting issues. However, I just did that and now the sent version of that message includes random characters everywhere I had double spacing. So just a heads up.

This new update is worse than the prior version. I am finding inconsistent formatting (output loses some of the formatting options selected on the LCR website), random insertion of characters on the sent message ( ), with a VERY laggy interface (sometimes 5 seconds for a typed letter to show up). I've tried to paste plain text and still have formatting issues compounded by the decreased number of formatting options (You can no longer, center, right, or left justify). (For reference, I am typing on a desktop computer using Chrome as a browser to send the message. I had similar problems on an iPad).

Anyone else having similar issues or found a better way to approach this?

[sebastian.buck]

It really astonishes me that even after years and years of these and similar problems the email system of the Church is still working like it was just invented in the 18th century or so.

Such email services are in no way unique to the Church. All cooperations and other institutions of all kinds are using this or at least similar systems. And though it seems the Church is simply unable to fix it even after a decade. Why is that?