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IT fixes nested-group email error after some councilors missed public comment messages
Summary
City IT staff said a nested distribution-group error caused some public comment emails to fail delivery; staff rebuilt groups, manually released undelivered messages and began testing and daily checks to reassure councilors that public comment emails are being received.
Lewiston’s information-technology staff told the council they resolved an email distribution problem that prevented some public comment messages and other council emails from reaching recipients.
IT Director Craig Star said the failure was caused by a nested distribution-group configuration in the cloud-hosted mail system. "Within that group all of the council members were referred to as the 2024 elected officials which is another distribution group," Star explained; nested groups blocked forwarding to a second group. IT deleted and rebuilt the groups as individual users and began manual testing.
Systems administrator Maurice Pelletier said staff manually released messages that failed to deliver and have instituted an 8:00 a.m. daily check of the public-comment mailbox. Pelletier acknowledged a recalled message that was later resent after verification with the police department and said the identical wording reflected that re-sent copy.
Councilors reported missed messages earlier this fall and urged transparency. Members of the public and councilors suggested posting public comment emails on the city website so residents could confirm receipt and read submissions directly. IT agreed to more testing and to continue reporting back on message delivery tests.
Next steps: IT will continue staged tests to confirm delivery to all individual addresses, send periodic test emails for council confirmation and keep a daily inbox check to ensure any undelivered public comment emails are manually released and forwarded to the council.
