I read widely, and that includes articles about the Church that are both positive and negative. In Revisiting the surreal day I resigned from the LDS Church, the author got fed up with all the unwanted emails he was receiving from the Church. He states:
Eventually whoever is in charge of this sort of thing (Moses?) transferred my membership records to my parents’ ward. I discovered this when I began receiving an onslaught of emails from the ward activities committee, elders quorum, and whatever poor soul had been assigned to beg people to clean meetinghouse toilets every Saturday. I responded to these emails, asking to be removed from the list. Nevertheless, the emails continued. I wasn’t too annoyed with this because, again, I had been on the other side of this type of outreach, and I knew what I was experiencing was probably more a matter of disorganization than targeted harassment.
When I read this, I had to smile, because I was then the "poor soul ... assigned to beg people to clean meetinghouse toilets every Saturday." I can also understand the feelings on both sides of this exchange.

He said he sent an angry letter to the bishop demanding to be finally removed from these email lists after many fruitless requests had gone unacted on.
The bishop responded quickly, apologizing, and explaining he wasn’t aware of my prior requests. He promised there would be no contact going forward and offered to assist with my record removal, if I wanted, by either having me send him a notarized letter or by meeting with him to sign a letter in his presence.
He did end up having his name formally removed from church membership records, and this is his prerogative.

My point is this: No one needs to receive unwanted emails in the Church for numerous reasons. I'm not going to comment on whether he should have resigned from the Church. The fact that this was the final straw and led to his resignation from membership is unfortunate. I'll detail why below.

The Church controls what emails it sends out. YOU control what emails you receive. This simple fact is unknown to most leaders as well as members, active or not. I can hardly blame him for not knowing these procedures when the bishop didn't know about them either.

Members and leaders are horribly uninformed, unskilled, and untrained on the Church's digital tools. I wrote a 21 piece blog series to help people understand it better. However, ignorance still prevails.

You control what emails you receive from the Church

You should not be an idle, hapless recipient of Church communications. You can control it! There are a number of ways to do so:

1. Log in to your Church Account and click on "Account Settings" in the top right-hand corner. In the left column, look for "Subscriptions" under "Personal". If you don't want to receive anything, click on "Unsubscribe from All." Otherwise, you can pick and choose. If you find everything from your local unit objectionable, make certain you unclick "Local Leader Email" and "Local Unit Event Notifications." Make your other choices.

2. To customize your local experience, go to your Ward Directory and Map. Click on your name. This will bring up your personal information. Look towards the bottom of the left column for the Edit Icon and click on it. Under contact, you can delete your email and phone number if you don't want to receive any communications. If you want to just hide it from members but let leadership access it, then you need to go back to "Account Settings" and click on "Visibility" under "Personal" again. You can make it visible to "Stake and Ward Organization Presidencies," "Stake Members" or just "Ward Members."

3. To further customize your selections, go to the digital Calendar. On the top left click on "Choose Calendars" or on the Gear Icon in the top right hand portion of your screen, select "Choose Calendars" from the drop-down menu. You can choose which calendar you see and which calendars you get email reminders from.

Which brings us to leadership and what the stake and units send out.

Church leaders control what emails are sent out

Actually, this is a misnomer because nobody controls this process at all. It's a haphazard set of occurrences. The point is they CAN control it and they SHOULD control it, but they DON'T control it!

Some sort of local information policy should be set up. I've made many suggestions that are ignored. People are getting too many emails from too many sources and too many people are simply ignoring the emails. We shouldn't be contributing to all of this electronic junk.

More careful decision-making needs to be exerted over what gets sent out and why. Not everything needs to be sent to everyone. Groups of people can be selected in the Church system. If it's a Young Women's activity, just send it to the Young Women, not the entire ward.

In fact, very little needs to be sent out at all. This notion is a relic of a different age. Before the digital system, leaders had to get information into people's hands. Not anymore. Leaders can put most of it online and simply let people ACCESS IT. In fact, nearly everything can go on the Calendar. You don't have to send out emails at all. If it is an event, put all the details on the calendar digital form "Event Details" and leave it there.

Naturally, things like births and deaths aren't Calendar events, but most of everything else can go on the Calendar. Instead, we've got a cryptic reference on the Calendar, and a few details get sent out in emails. SOMETIMES, the emails even contain enough information for people to actually participate, like the who, what, when, where, why and how I constantly harp about including.

Sadly, people impose the extreme space limitations of the paper era on the digital system. There is often only a cryptic reference to an event that is only useful to remember an event is taking place. You have to obtain the necessary information elsewhere to actually participate.

For example, recent "Event Details" on my stake/unit calendar included an Egg Derby event where the event details said, "Just like it sounds." with a smiling emoji, or a Relief Society activity where the event details said, "Picnic." These cannot even be dignified with the term "details."

Conclusion

Instead of letting people just "wing it" and do whatever they want with the Church's communication tools, I wish local unit leaders would set down some ground rules and not let people send out whatever emails they want on whatever subject they want whenever they want.

Educating people and training members and leaders on the best use of these tools would accomplish a lot.

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