SPAM PROBLEM

What to do if you are not receiving the twice-monthly eLessons emails
 

Possible solutions: There are many unethical spammers. In response, there are aggressive anti-spamming rules and laws … and something called blacklisting. There is no feasible, ethical, and legal way for us to guarantee that our eLesson emails always get through the anti-spamming maze. We could not break the rules and laws, and then expect God to bless you in applying and multiplying the eLessons. We are doing our best to get our emails through. However if you aren’t receiving them, you may want to do one or more of the following four.

1. Go directly to eLessons.org. One sure solution is to visit www.eLessons.org regularly to retrieve the current twice-monthly Bible lessons. However, it is nice to get an email reminder from us … so please read on.

2. Change your mail settings. You may have inadvertently blocked our emails in your email settings … diverting them to your spam or trash folder. If so, go to the mail controls in your email program (Outlook, AOL, etc.) and change the settings to allow mail from these two domains constantcontact.com and roving.com … the domain names of our email distribution service.

3. Use an alternate address. If after a few weeks our emails are not getting to you, use an alternative email address (if possible and permitted) such as one at home, work, or school. Or you could signup for a free email account with a service like Hotmail or Yahoo. Then re-subscribe using that alternate address.

4. Send an email to your email provider. Your ISP may be inappropriately blocking our email distribution service. You might make progress by requesting your ISP to permit our emails to be delivered to you … requesting that they lift the block. A sample letter is at the end of this page.

What we are doing about the problem: A small percentage of our emails get blocked because we follow the rules, laws, and etiquette of emailing. The spammers don’t … often changing or counterfeiting their originating IP addresses. A reputable emailing service distributes our eLessons emails … as they do other emails for their many religious and secular customers. One complaint from one email recipient from any one of their customers can temporarily blacklist the distribution service (and consequentially block our eLessons). Some companies providing blacklisting services don’t seriously investigate complaints … even if something as simple as a misspelling during subscription inadvertently adds the wrong address to a list. They just aggressively add the distribution service to their blacklist. Some ISPs use these blacklists to block emails instead of sending them. That is like your post office filtering and censuring your regular mail … deciding which envelopes, cards, and packages you will receive while discarding or returning the others. I hate spam. However, I also don’t like my mail being censured by anyone but me. On our part, we send a duplicate eLesson notification about a week after the first one … just in case our distribution company has been temporarily and inappropriately blacklisted. That gives them time to resolve the issue. Please tolerate getting a duplicate notification email from us for each eLesson … it increases the probability of your getting at least one such notification per eLesson.

Sample email to your ISP’s Customer Support Department

Why you should send it: By emailing customer support at your ISP, you may help resolve temporary blacklisting problems for you and for other eLesson subscribers. Your expressed dissatisfaction with their blocking may help them (and us) serve you better. Your specific request that they lift their blocking may be all that is needed to resolve the issue. Copy/paste the following into a new email adding your ISP’s customer support email address and your name at the end.

To: ISP Customer Support
Subject: Please Remove Constant Contact Block

I have been a satisfied customer of your services for some time. I understand that you may have a blacklist in place to protect customers like myself from unsolicited email. If true, this blacklist has made it impossible for me to receive important teaching that I have subscribed to receive. I value this teaching and would like to receive it using this email address.

The sender of these subscription-only emails follows all the rules and etiquette of emailing … and distributes them through an emailing service called Constant Contact. Constant Contact is not an open relay and has extremely strict anti-spam policies in place. I am unable to receive these subscription emails; therefore it may be that you are blocking my emails from Constant Contact.

I ask that you add Constant Contact to your white list.

For further information about Constant Contact you may contact their Ops team at 781.444.6160 ext. 303 or ops@constantcontact.com.

Technical Notes for your Network Department
- IP: 63.251.135.74
- IP: 63.251.135.75
- IP: 63.251.135.115
- IP: 63.251.135.98
- IP: 63.251.135.103
- IP: 63.251.135.109
- IP: 64.95.77.162
- IP: 64.95.77.163
- IP: 64.95.77.164
- To be notified of changes send email to ops@roving.com

If you desire to speak with the originator of the subscription teaching, visit www.ActsOneEight.org for email and telephone contact information. I subscribed to their teaching at another of their Web sites … www.eLessons.org.

Please contact me when this problem has been resolved.

Sincerely,

(insert your name here)