Simplified Member and Officer Email Lists for All Toastmost Users

Email distribution lists — write to one address, and your message is delivered to everyone on the list — are now available for all Toastmasters clubs who want them on the Toastmost.org hosting service. Toastmost is the easiest way to create a website that incorporates the WordPress for Toastmasters software.

Until now, getting an email list on Toastmost required club leaders to file a request and wait for the server administrator (me) to perform a few manual steps. Now, these email lists can be enabled with a couple of clicks. For new users, the choice of whether to enable them is part of the club website setup wizard that welcomes them to the service.

Once enabled, the distribution lets any club member to send a message to the rest of the club.

For example, this is a test I did for the Webinarmasters club, relayed through webinarmasters@toastmost.org.

Club officers are advised to limit use of the member email list to club business or social invitations. Members who abuse the list can have their access blocked. Messages from unrecognized addresses will also be blocked to prevent it from becoming a vehicle for spam.

A separate list allows officers to email all the other officers, using the officer list from the Toastmasters settings screen on the WordPress dashboard. In both cases, it’s possible to specify additional list recipients (for example, including an area director or past president on the officers email list).

Although this configuration is Toastmost-specific, webmasters who host the software elsewhere can enable mailing lists through the Group Email tab of the RSVPMaker plugin’s Settings screen. The difference is they will have to do more of the work related to email server configuration themselves.