Why AOL Users Didn’t Receive This Week’s Sermon

We are having more and more problems with people not receiving the weekly sermon emails. That’s a growing problem with everyone who uses email both on the sending and receiving end because of the proliferation of spam. Last year spam messages increased by 100%, which anyone can attest by checking your email for fraudulent offers of money from the “widow” of some deceased African general or from someone writing with the offer of a pill that will work anatomical wonders or from someone writing to entice you to a website you shouldn’t be visiting in the first place. The Internet tends to be somewhat like the Wild West–where there aren’t many rules and anything goes.

Right now we have nearly 4150 people on the list–our highest total ever. Our tracking software tells us when the sermons are being “soft bounced,” meaning that an Internet provider isn’t letting them through. That happened this week with the sermons sent to AOL subscribers. All 492 of them were blocked. That’s over 10% of the list. If you are an AOL subscriber, you didn’t get the sermon “Why I Need My Enemies and My Enemies Need Me–Part 1.” It just didn’t show up in your inbox. That’s the second time in three weeks all the AOL subscribers have been prevented from receiving the sermon.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do about it. These big services aren’t really worried about letting sermons from us get through. It’s sort of like metal detectors at an airport that are set to high sensitivity. You can complain if you like, but in the end you’ll still have to put your watch and your cell phone in a container so it can go through the scanner. As the spammers have gotten more creative, the big companies have responded by setting their anti-spam sensors to a very high level. And even though you personally signed up for the weekly sermons, sometimes those sensors regard the sermons as spam.

So what can you do? If you aren’t receiving the weekly sermons, try checking in these places:

1) Your Junk mail file.
2) Your Deleted file.
3) Your Spam file.
4) Your Bulk mail file.
5) The spam folder in your spam-catcher program (like McAfee or Norton).
6) Your ISP’s spam-catcher program.
7) Your online spam-catcher, like Barracuda or Postini.

You might find the sermons, you might not.

We plan to switch to a different bulk email system that may help a little bit. But as we’ve been told, “Everyone has the same problem trying to send out emails to thousands of people at once.”

So we’re trying but it’s getting harder and harder to get email through. We do post every new sermon on the website so you can read them there. Thanks for your patience. We’re doing everything we can think of to get the sermons to your inbox.