russellhltn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 26, 2025 12:34 am
One of the ways to get labeled a spammer is to keep sending emails to an address you've been told isn't good. If GMail is rejecting, then the problem is on them. The servers are taking the message at face value.
But why is a legitimate email address "not good"? Why would Gmail tell mail.churchofjesuschrist.org that an address that is good everywhere else is "not good" when it comes from the Church and then proceed to treat it as a spammer?
It really depends on the reason for why it wasn't good. There are two types of email rejection. A 4XX level rejection which is considered a temporary failure, and a 5XX level rejection which is considered permanent. If Gmail returns a 4XX then the MTA will retry delivery for some period of time. If Gmail returns 5XX then that tells the sending MTA that retry delivery will fail, however, that doesn't mean that the human who receives the DSN (aka bounce message) cannot read the reason for the failure, figure out the problem, and resend it.
Accordingly, not all types of failures are the same and not all 5XX mean that the address should never be used again. For example, if someone attaches a 100MB zip file to an email and sends it to Gmail it will be permanently rejected with a 5XX level error due to size. Does this mean that the recipient email address should not ever be used again? What it means is that if the sender tries again to send a 100MB message it won't work. There are numerous reasons for 5XX type error messages, none of which mean "never send an email to this address ever again".
Keep in mind that we're talking about "working" email addresses. They work everywhere else but with LCR. We know that the addresses are legitimate and do
not result in 5XX failures in general because the member is actively using them with other communicants. It's not like members have signed up for their Church accounts using email addresses that are bogus and would result in eternal 5XX failures. Even if the Church has a policy of automatically suppressing delivery to addresses that receive a 5XX failure, for whatever reason, they should at least offer an option to the members to remove their email address from purgatory. This could be a button in the Church Account pages.
While Gmail is really the worst for email problems among all the big providers, I don't believe at all that Gmail has selectively decided to permanently reject emails from some Church members for failures that resulted from temporary or otherwise transient reasons. I think it's more ilkely that the problem exists elsewhere.
Unfortunately, what we're dealing with in these discussions are 2 large organizations (3 if you include Amazon SES) which have made it difficult to communicate with their patrons which doesn't make it easy to resolve problems. Has any "customer" of Gmail ever contacted Gmail and asked them if they are blocking communications sent from the Church to their email address? What was the response? I've contacted the Church via GSD about why the messages are being rejected and I have gotten no straight answer, only misdirections (check your mailbox size, check that mail.churchofjesuschrist.org is whitelisted, check this, check that), but nobody has ever given me a positive confirmation (or denial) that my email address is not on the Church's Amazon SES suppression list.