Member and Officer Email Lists

Email distribution lists — write to one address, and your message is delivered to everyone on the list — are available for club members and officers.

For new users, the choice of whether to enable them is part of the club website setup wizard.

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 a fictional 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).

Options on the Group Email Settings Page

For each email list, you must supply the list email address (which also functions as the user name) and a password.

The other fields associated with each list are:

• Whitelist – additional email addresses allowed to send to the list. Example: a member who is a district officer and sometimes sends messages from district email address rather than the personal address on their member profile.
• Blacklist – If a member abuses their access to the email list, you can block them from sending.messages.
• Additional recipients – A manually entered list of recipients. For example, former members who still want to receive news from the club, or advisors to the officer team who you want included on the officers email list even though they are not officially officers.

In each case, the email addresses can be entered separated by commas or spaces or one per line.

Bounced Messages

If a sender’s email is not associated with an authorized sender account, it will bounce with a message like this:

If you want to allow sending to from this email address, you can add them to the whitelist.

A member who has a user account but whose sending to the list has been blocked by an administrator will receive this message.

Tradeoffs

You may occasionally see IMAGE OMITTED where an image was supposed to appear in the body of a message. In most cases, embedded images will be preserved.

Attachments such as PDFs will be listed as links at the end of the message. Recipients have the option of downloading them. For security reasons, unrecognized file types will not be forwarded.