This web site generates emails to members including:
- Regular update emails
- Emails to group members from group leaders
- Emails to group leaders
- Notifications of new forum topics and replies
Members and non-members can also send emails to members.
You have several options for email addresses you use to send and receive email addresses. All have advantages and disadvantages. Click any of the options below to see more details.
Simply use your normal email address
That's the easiest option. It suffers two key disadvantages:
- Emails from the site have to be sent from addresses registered with Amazon. Unless you take steps (see next section) we have to use an alternative 'from' address - emailer@haylingu3a.org - for emails you send through the site. The body of the email explains that people cannot reply directly to your email (which is a pain) but they have to rekey your email address (provided in the body of the email) instead.
- Emails sent to you come from Amazon's servers. These have a high reputation so minimise the possibility that replies go to your spam folder.
Register your normal email address with Amazon
We arrange for you to receive an email from Amazon with a link to confirm your registration. Once that's done we tell the web site it no longer has to use emailer@haylingu3a.org as your 'from' address. People receiving your emails can reply to your emails directly.
There's one big drawback: some ISPs instruct recipients of your emails to reject them if they didn't originate from their servers. That's arrogant, but there's nothing we can do about it. So far we know of just one ISP that does this: Yahoo mail which includes all BT Internet addresses.
Set up mail forwarding
We instruct the HIU3A web site to forward all emails it receives to yourname@haylingu3a.org to your normal email address. This has three key advantages:
- You can update your email address on the web site to yourname@haylingu3a.org. Your emails sent through the server will show that as your 'from' address (not emailer@haylingu3a.org) so they can reply to you directly.
- Your personal email address is not revealed to recipients.
- By using a haylingu3a.org address you make it clear you are a member of the club - which may give your emails more authority, useful when contacting suppliers, for example. Note, however, some email services need a mailbox to be set up (see next section) before you can send from that email address.
The approach has one drawback, however: forwarded emails are sent from the HIU3A server not an Amazon server. It's therefore more likely that replies to your emails will end up in your spam folder.