Yesterday I realised that at least two of our membership are not getting their TMC email messages (new member votes and any other administrative stuff).
Currently I manually maintain an email distribution list separately to the main site. Every member of the site has their email address added to the list, me included.
The alternative method that is available to me is to use the bulk email facility of the site itself.
Maintaining a separate distribution list has the following implications:
- Everyone can use the list - its use is not dependant on a level of administrative privilege on the site. This has been quite useful this last weekend when we were discussing the reponse to certain external events!
- I have to keep the list separately up to date, which creates the risk of things getting out of synch.
- People can maintain their own email addresses for contact purposes, as part of their profile data.
- When people change their email address, they can just change their info without needing to tell me
- Only someone with administration privilege can use the bulk emailer, so using it to contact everyone in the group is not an option for the membership I'm afraid
Now, the real reason the problem came to light this weekend is that a couple of people had forgotten they had TMC email accounts. So I suppose that the next question is, do you think we should continue to dish out TMC email addresses to anyone in the group who wants one? Frankly, recently very few people have. Technically there's no problem with dishing these out, although it'll give me slightly more work when I eventually move us to our new server (real soon now, folks!).
I'm deliberately putting this discussion in an open forum as I see no reason why non-members should not be exposed to our democratic processes, and every reason in fact why they should! However, since this is an open forum please do not mention the list name in your replies.
OK, please let me know what you think! Separate email distribution list available to everyone, or just me using the bulk emailer?
TMC email accounts (with webmail service) available to new members or don't bother?
Cheers
Phil