Some holders of email accounts from notable (and formerly ubiquitous) web services providers Yahoo! and AOL may not receive any sort of email communication from Church accounts, including official messaging and marketing from Salt Lake City, emails from area representatives, and even any message sent by local leaders over Leader and Clerk Resources (LCR), the main gateway local leaders use to carry out administrative work.
Yahoo! and its subsidiary, AOL, are both owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which also owns AMC Theatres. A representative from the Church’s IT department confirmed email sent to domains owned by Apollo are not making it to users’ inboxes. And because a platform like LCR does not function like a full-throated email marketing service like Constant Contact or Mailchimp, the sender will not receive any information on bouncebacks, undeliverables, etc.; emails sent through LCR simply go out into the ether, and user have no means of tracker who actually opened the message and interacted with the content.
In the meantime, leaders should take note of members in their ward using the email services in question and consider forwarding LCR-derived emails to those addresses, or sending content separately. Either way, do not count on all of your Church emails reaching their intended audiences on their own at the current time.
Thankfully, at least for Church leaders, Yahoo! and AOL, once the most dominant forces on the web, now represent a much smaller share of overall email traffic. It is more likely your ward members have Gmail, Outlook, or Hotmail accounts.
