Trouble With the Weekly Email Sermons?

If you have signed up for the weekly sermon emails, this note is for you.

In early January we switched to a new system for sending out the sermons. Even though visually the weekly sermons look the same, we are using a new company and a different program to send them out. When we made the switch, we simply took all the old addresses and added them to the new system. However, some people aren’t receiving the sermons any more. I know this because some of you have written to say, “What happened to the sermons?” The answer is, nothing happened. I still send them out each week. Okay, I admit my schedule has been erratic but most weeks I send out the sermon on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. I haven’t missed a week yet. So if you signed up and aren’t receiving the sermons each week, what happened and what should you do?

A) If you were on the list before January 1, you are still on the list today.
B) If you have signed up since January 1, you have to reply to the confirmation email that was sent to you. Unless you do that, your subscription will be regarding as “pending” and you won’t receive the sermons.
C) If you aren’t sure if you signed up or if you aren’t sure about the confirmation, send me an email and I’ll check it for you myself.

But let’s suppose you were getting the sermons and then suddenly you aren’t. What has probably happened is this:

1) Spam has increased dramatically over the last several years.
2) So people have put up barriers and firewalls against spam.
3) Spammers tend to send out large batches of emails at once–5000, 50,000, 5,000,000, and even more.
4) The anti-spam programs out there tend to flag emails sent out in a large batch.
5) As batches goes, ours is fairly small–only 2900 each week. But still that’s a batch.
6) So somehow the weekly sermon email is being flagged as spam.

What should you do then?

1) Check your Deleted folder. That’s the first place to look. Some programs send emails they flag as spam directly to the Deleted folder. One reader suddenly “found” the sermons in her Deleted folder.

2) Check your Junk Mail folder if you have one.

3) Check your Spam folder if you have one.

The sermons actually may be on your computer in one of those folders.

4) If you have a spam-catcher program like McAfee or Norton or any sort of anti-spam program, it will sometimes have a special folder within the program that catches all the spam. This means that the spam does even show up in the “regular” folders of your email program. The sermons might be in there.

5) Your server run by your local Internet provider may have a spam-catcher program. The sermons might be there. That is, they could be sitting on a server and never be getting to your computer. Usually there is a way for you to check the spam-catcher program on your server.

6) What I’m saying is, the sermons may be in there with all those emails offering cheap meds, weight-loss products, and scams from the widow of the former leader of some country in Africa offering to help you make big money fast. You’ll have to sort through to see if you can find anything from “Ray Pritchard” or raypritchard@keepbelieving.com.

What do you do if you eventually find the sermons but they aren’t coming to your Inbox?

7) There is almost always a way you can tell the program, “Send me everything from this address.”

8) Note that the sermons are coming from raypritchard@keepbelieving.com, ray@keepbelieving.com. You may need to instruct your program to allow all emails from raypritchard@keepbelieving.com.

Basically if you are on the sermon list, you should be getting the sermons, but it may take some detective work on your end to find out where they are. This is a very common problem. In these days of anti-spam software and firewalls, group emails often get lost or misdirected.

If you receive the sermons but they won’t open or are blank or have strange code in them:

Some people have had problems with the format and appearance of the last two sermon emails. This has been especially evident for people with Yahoo.com addresses. Suffice it to say, we’ve spent time working on it, and we think we’ve got the problem solved.

I am mentioning all this because KBM is an Internet-based ministry and the weekly sermons are central to our ministry of providing usable resources for pastors, Christian leaders and believers around the world. We hope you will use the sermons in any way that will be helpful to you. We know of pastors in Ghana that use the sermons. We have friends in Uganda and Kenya that use the sermons. A friend in Singapore forwards them to pastors in the Philippines. A Bible study group in New Zealand uses the sermons. A few days ago I received this note from a man who is serving an interim pastor for a church in Alabama:

Just a word of encouragement to tell you I enjoy receiving and reading the weekly sermon e-mails. They are a source of inspiration to me. I also consider them as part of the ’mentoring’ that I need weekly as a Pastor. God has used you to help me ’much’ in the ministry.

Thanks for reading through to the end of this note. It’s one way you can know that we regard the weekly sermon emails as a vital part of the KBM ministry of encouragement through the Word of God. If you haven’t signed up for the weekly sermons, you can do so by filling out the form in the upper right-hand corner of this page.