Flagging church emails as spam

[Anonymous]

I have to admit this one gave me a bit of a chuckle. I went online to pay our tithing today and the following banner appeared on the donations page:

Quote:

Important Message

Dear Donors:

We have received reports that some users have flagged or continue to flag emails sent by Online Donations as SPAM or JUNK instead of deleting them. Marking Online Donation generated emails as SPAM or JUNK increases the risk of your email provider (i.e., gmail, yahoo, etc..) blacklisting the Church and blocking all email communication to any individual using that email provider.

If you do not wish to receive donation email notifications, please go to Settings, scroll down to Notification Preferences, and uncheck the “Donation Submitted” and/or “Donation Recorded” boxes.

We appreciate your attention and cooperation as we all try to ensure the Church maintains its ability to communicate information to everyone via email.

Thank you for using Online Donations

I get that people might have done as they say. Long ago I had turned off the tithing messages as they suggest after getting annoyed by the multiple messages. I know I just went online and paid, I don’t need reassurance.

That said, I do sometimes get other messages that annoy me (mostly local level) and there really isn’t a way to control which of those you get. For example, I can’t just turn off missionary messages or food storage messages (yes we still get those here), they’re either all on or all off. Sometimes I do like to get notifications of SC broadcasts and whatnot, so they’re all on, and I’m only annoyed for a few seconds when I see the topic and hit delete. FWIW, I was the “beneficiary” of the church email glitch that no emails sent to certain domains (Yahoo and Hotmail, not sure of others) don’t go through. They just don’t go, they don’t go to spam or anything, people just don’t receive them. Out of the blue I recently started to get some of those emails again (a missionary one 🙄 ). It’s actually been a couple years at least, and it seems the church IT folks may be trying to get a handle on the problem. But I’m not sure the above scenario is the only reason the glitch might be happening, or why it’s happening at all. I suspect some people get more emails than I do (copious calendar reminders they don’t know how to shut off or whatever) and just hit their spam button. Again, I’m not sure that’s the only reason but I would not be surprised if it contributes to the problem.

[Anonymous]

I thought I hadn’t received any emails for a while now. You prompted me to go online and check my email subscriptions. I was immediately met with the following.

[attachment=0]message.png[/attachment]

I knew that privacy settings were ignored for stake and ward leaders. It looks like the list of people that are allowed to violate people’s wishes for privacy is now extended to your ministers and the people you’re assigned to minster. Is the exemption for ministers new?

I’ve got to say… not a fan. What’s the point in setting your info to private if half the ward can see it (and share it with the half that can’t)?

I don’t have my info set to private but I’ll go to bat for the people that do. They’re probably setting their info to private for a reason. It’s no bueno to ignore their wishes, regardless of what Moroni said (spoiler, he didn’t say anything about exemptions to people’s desire for privacy).

It also begs the question, what if the best way to “minister” to people is to respect their decisions?

Back on subject…

I was surprised to find that there’s a lot more granularity when it comes to email subscriptions. In the past there were maybe two or three options, now I see over a dozen.

I don’t seen an option to filter by subject matter. E.g. food storage, missionary work, hiking the covenant path, etc. Right now the filters appear to be limited to broader categories like church magazines, local leaders, church announcements, etc.

[Anonymous]

Interesting Nibbler. I did once have a someone I was supposed to minister to that had their settings on private. She still wanted ministering apparently but I couldn’t see her address etc., so had to ask her in church. BTW, she mostly didn’t want to be “stalked” (she was a bit paranoid but some of it was legit). She moved a couple years ago, so no telling now if I can see or not, although I do know another family set to private but I’m not their leader or minister (in their case they desire no contact). Which brings it full circle – I also respect the desire of those who wish to remain unseen and unbothered and it does bother me a bit that some people can still see info people might want private.

Yes, there are no filters for emails from local leaders, it’s either on or off. Again, I’m sure some places are more annoying that where I live, and some are probably less. Most of the crap I don’t want.

[Anonymous]

This is interesting to me.

I actually set up my privacy settings to minimize the people who had access to my address because I didn’t want “to be rescued”.

I switched away from my “yahoo mail” to a different email provider for church emails because the “yahoo emails” were being flagged as spam (and I actually cared about getting them at the time).

I also have the “family phone number”, so people looking for my husband by phone find me first (my husband HATES phones).

I did intercept the new HT that way. I also set some very specific boundaries about “bearing testimony” and the like. We wound up going to church on Sunday, so I hunted him down and more or less interrogated him to see if he would abide by my conditions or honorably release himself from being our HT. The jury is still out on what level of engagement (based on his sense of obligation and our family’s “charm”) we will end up with. I am not optimistic though.

[Anonymous]

I just opened up the LDS Tools app and upon opening I got the same message that nibbler shared.

I wonder how it will affect ministering companions being able to see each other’s info. Just a couple weeks ago, my assigned companion wanted to get a hold of me and couldn’t because my number was not visible to him. I will be annoyed if that’s changed.

[Author]

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