When you send a Message, it goes into a queue under a Ready to Send status. A routine runs every one to five minutes to check if there are any new Messages to send and, if so, sends them out and changes the message status to Sent. The recipient's carrier may have a small delay to deliver the email. In the end, it could take a few minutes for your intended recipient to receive your email. If it takes longer than that, notify your SPoC.

The New Message Tool automatically uses a 10-12pt font and a Sans Serif font. Right now, the only way to override this is to edit the Message's HTML. To edit the HTML, click the HTML Source button and edit the direct HTML. See HTML Fields.

If you catch this before your server sends it (that is, the Message has a status of Ready to Send), you can stop it. Go to Communications > Messages, select the incorrect Messages, and then select the Assign tool to update the selected records to have a status of Draft. If the Message already has a status of Sent, you can't retract it.

Copy the Message record (the Message, not the Recipient, and do not copy any Sub-Page data) and change the Status to Draft. From the Home page, click the My Messages tab, select the Draft view, and open the Message. Search for and select the Recipients (or use the pick list), and then click Send.

SendGrid is a transactional email service that you can use to send your system's email Messages. We recommend you use SendGrid. See SendGrid for more details.

Mandrill logs delivered and rejected emails. Log in to Mandrill, and click Outbound to view your email log. Then, click Dashboard. There, you can see if you used all of your free sends and, most importantly, if there are "backlogged" emails. If so, your emails are not reaching your recipients.

When you paste from Word, the New Message Tool strips out any Microsoft Outlook (MSO) formatting. This prevents odd or blank messages if your recipient email provider does not support MSO formatting. Instead of building your emails in the New Message Tool, try the Template Editor Tool.

The HTML you paste into the MinistryPlatform Message contains several "tokens" that it can't resolve. Essentially, wherever MinistryPlatform sees brackets ([ ]) it looks for something to replace, like [Nickname]. The HTML includes these brackets that don't make sense to the system. A prompt displays to review these tokens. We recommend you remove them, but you can click Send Anyway.

If the email sends from a step in a Process, the User assigned to the From field on the Message must have at least read rights to any merged fields in the email. If the User does not have read rights, MinistryPlatform can't send the Message and it remains in Draft status.

There is not an automatic signature feature in the New Message Tool. However, here are a couple ideas from other churches on how to include signatures (though not automatically, at least a little easier for users):

• Save the signature as an image online, and then use the Insert Image button in the New Message Tool to add your personal signature URL so it displays at the bottom of your emails.
• ​Create a generic signature Snippet. To do so, go to Communications > Communication Snippets, and create a new Snippet with a general signature so you can select the Snippet and type in your name or title.

The Message page is the single Message you created and sent to one or more recipients. The Message page contains the body of the Message and details about how you sent the Message.

MinistryPlatform archives Messages over six months old based on the Action Status Time, or date and time. To see your Archived Messages, go to the Home page, click the My Messages tab, and select the Archived view.

It is important to use an email provider that can handle bulk emails. We highly recommend you use SendGrid.

Yes. For best results, insert a placeholder thumbnail image with a play button superimposed in the email and link it to the video site. Many email clients do not support playing embedded videos, so this method ensures a smoother viewing process for recipients.

Yes, you can do this with the New Message Tool. For more information, see Message Recipients.

If you modify only the Message body on a Message marked Ready to Send, this doesn't update the Recipient Messages that you already rendered. You must modify the status and then you can use the Tool to make any necessary changes.

You may need to add additional individuals to a selection of Recipients. For example, you need to send an email to Participants in a Group, but you also want to add a few additional Participants who are not in the Group. While you can create a basic selection of Recipients in Select Message Recipients, you can't add additional records outside of the Page > Sub-Page selection. Instead, create your selection first and then launch the New Message Tool:

1. Open the Group.
2. On the Participants tab, select the Participants and transfer them to the Contacts or Participants page.
3. Open the Contact or Participants page.
4. Select the records for the additional Recipients.
5. Use the Transfer Selection Tool to add that selection to the selection you created.
6. Launch the New Message Tool.
7. In the Select Message Recipients window, go to the Contacts or Participants page and select the selection.

This can happen from malformed markup in the HTML of the body (for example, you don't nest tags or close them properly). HTML rendering agents are all different and handle malformed HTML differently. Even if a Message looks correct in a browser, the email provider may not handle the malformed items the same way.

One way to correct the HTML is to paste the text into a plain text editor to remove any HTML markup, then recreate the HTML markup in the Message. Follow these steps for any text you need to recreate (this does not work well for headers, footers, or images):

1. Cut the text from the email.
2. Paste it into a plain text editor (not a word processor).
3. Copy the text from the text editor.
4. Paste it back into the Message.
5. Add any formatting using the MinistryPlatform HTML editor.

Yes, this is for storage and security purposes. When you look at the Message record, you see the Template or verbiage in the Body field. In the Sub-Page, you see who received the Message and when it sent. Due to security reasons regarding personal information, you can no longer see the subject and body in MinistryPlatform, but it contains the merged data instead of the tokens.