TOPIC:

Emails from our club website often fail to send, or take a long time to send. I've noticed this most with role call emails (sent by clicking the envelope button on the agenda page), but it can also happen with other emails from the site, such as sending a New Member Welcome. The image below shows what happens: a spinning icon (a circle of circles) appears, and continues spinning for a very long time. I've seen it last more than half an hour. Even when it stops spinning, and claims that the email has been sent, sometimes it hasn't.
Our club Secretary has also reported this problem. We've seen it in Chrome and Firefox, on a variety of devices. Emails most recently failed to send yesterday, April 1, between 5 pm and 6 pm CT. The most recent slow email was a New Member Welcome sent today, April 2, at about 10 am CT.

EPA Toastmasters #4501
epa.toastmastersclubs.org

Yes at certain times of the day it does take longer to send the emails, just be patient and the emails will send.

Can you give a date and time of day when the emails did not send?

2021-04-01 (yesterday) between 1700 and 1800 CT, two attempts to send the agenda failed. The third worked, but not all club members received it.

There is definitely an issue. I will have to have the programmer look into.
Are there any recent changes to the agenda that you have made?

You will have to set the VP Education officer again, I removed.

The agendas are the same as they have been all year, but this only started happening over the last two months or so.

I have sort of figured out what is going on here.

We have a built in email address checker that we run to check each and every email address before we attempt to email the agenda to an email address. It is this email address check that is hanging up.

The interesting thing is that it is hanging up for the epa.gov email addresses, specifically, so if you selected to send to all members you would definitely catch those in the recipients. You can verify this if you select one or more epa.gov email addresses from Membership Management and run the Email Address Checker tool from the drop-down there. It hangs up there, also, since the same code is run to do the check in both places.

At this point, I am not sure if it is every epa.gov email address in your member list that causes the hangup. I did try checking an epa.gov email address in some web based email address checkers (CheckTLS, BulkEmailVerifier, EmailHippo, etc.) but the results were mixed. I suspect if you selectively emailed the agenda to non-epa.gov members as a troubleshooting measure, it would probably work fine.

***In any case, the internal email address checker is supposed to be fault tolerant and not hang up even if the email address is bad, so I need to look into that a bit more.

So I am seeing some issues when I use CheckTLS with Matt Rau's epa.gov address, as one example that I tested. I think there are other examples, also.

There is something fishy going on with the epa.gov email addresses. Not every time, but I can definitely see some connection timeouts and other issues with CheckTLS--it is probably the most authoritative external email checker we can use.