Auto remove inactive email addresses

Steve:
I saw your message when I logged on as an admin today at Omaha Toastmasters Club 281.

I have two suggestions.

1.) You already have a timer that shows how long it has been since a member's last login. What would you think of a warning email at five months and moving the member to a "not opted in" status at six months? The club admin could then resend the opt in if the member wishes to use the website again.

2.) As a club officer, I can now run an administrative report from Club Central. When I am inviting past members to a club anniversary, I don't need to use your interface. Why not remove the email to former members functionality. It may also be a good idea to invoke the "opt in" process when moving a former member to the active membership list. It may also be worth doing the "opt in" process anytime the member or the admin updates the email address.

Tom Colling
Omaha Toastmasters Club 281

You wrote:

[2019-02-23 21:20:16 GMT, FTH Developer] As I alluded to in a prior message, FTH has been experiencing some email deliverability issues. While you may think this is a "bug" or a problem with FTH, the reality is that it is the result of several things happening at the same time... a perfect storm.

I have been scrambling for a number of years to ensure that the email sending code in the system keeps pace with the ever evolving email systems and requirements. It is an ongoing challenge made more complicated by the fact that there is very little consistency in how different email systems (e.g. Gmail vs Outlook) handle emails and what their expectations are for a "good email" vs spam. We have had to add email security features to outgoing emails on your behalf to keep the major email systems from considering emails send though FTH as being spam. However, the email libraries we use for the server code (and email) are a bit limited in their support of email security features... I have had to use quite a few workarounds to get everything to in the system to "play nice" and work well in an integrated fashion.

Most of you probably do not want to have to deal with all this technical stuff... that is understandable. However, you all need to understand that this is important to *everyone* that uses the FreeToastHost system. If we cannot deliver email via FTH, we will have to stop supporting that and a very important aspect of the system would be essentially left to "die on the vine".

Additionally, there seem to be some clubs that insist on sending out blasts of emails to anyone who ever was in contact with the club, even if that was from years ago. That is essentially using the system to spam those people, and this sort of activity will be eliminated from the system one way or another... I will stop it and I will be very heavy-handed about it, if need be. My patience is gone and the system's email reputation has been negatively impacted,

Next, some clubs do not clear out bogus email addresses. If you keep sending emails to bogus email addresses, some email systems consider that to be the "mark of a spammer". Again, I will address this, and I will be very heavy-handed about it, if need be.

You may think that the email activities of your specific club does not affect anyone else who uses the FTH system. That is just patently wrong. We all use the same FTH server for email... One club that is not responsible for how they sent email through the system *will* eventually affect everyone else that uses the system.

Please spread the word within your respective districts that clubs using FTH need to be more responsible in how they send email via FTH. They need to delete any non-member email addresses that have been in the system for longer than 6 months and they need to delete any bogus/non-working email addresses from their member data immediately. If you regularly send out a lot of emails to club members, please consider implementing a "email rationing scheme" for your club to limit the number of emails sent each day to a maximum value. It may require combining multiple topics in one email, but your members will likely thank you, and you will be helping to keep the system viable for the future.

I wish I didn't feel the need to send these sorts of messages out, but we are at the point where the attention level needs to be raised. The steps we take moving forward could very well impact the long-term viability of FreeToastHost.

Regards,

Steve James, DTM
FreeToastHost System Developer
https;//support.toastmastersclubs.org

Tom,

Thanks for the suggestions. These are in line with the sorts of things I am considering. Appreciate the post.

Currently, I am not as concerned about emails to current club members. However, this very well could be an issue, also, if clubs fail to move past/inactive members to the former members list. For example, if people who are no longer members keep getting emails via the members list, they may be inclined to mark the emails as spam in their email system, since they will not likely have control over whether they are still on the members list in FTH. I could add a "I am no longer a member" links in emails to members, but there is no guarantee that would get used, and then we would have to deal with the issue of what happens if they click it by mistake.

- Steve

At our club we have amassed a lot of email addresses from former members and from former guests. I would like to remove the older ones from these lists, and I understand how important this is. However, I don't know how old these entries are. If nobody has cared to follow up these entries and document this in the web site (and nobody has ever caredito do this in our club), I nave no idea when these entries were made.
Is there a way to find out now?
I would find it useful to add a field to the data base: When quit as a member? and When been a guest? Then it would be easy to weed out these data in the future.

Andreas wrote: At our club we have amassed a lot of email addresses from former members and from former guests. I would like to remove the older ones from these lists, and I understand how important this is. However, I don't know how old these entries are. If nobody has cared to follow up these entries and document this in the web site (and nobody has ever caredito do this in our club), I nave no idea when these entries were made.
Is there a way to find out now?
I would find it useful to add a field to the data base: When quit as a member? and When been a guest? Then it would be easy to weed out these data in the future.

Understood... Thanks for your input. We have the date information in the database already... it is just not readily visible to users at the moment.

I had the same idea and have the same request. I see that we can generate Excel exports from the Membership Management tool. Would it be possible to auto-include a column in those exports indicating when the entry was created?

Sue Worden DTM (Clubs 311, 4992, 6651, 8510, 3702856)

Steve, thanks for all you do, first and foremost. Ia green that perhaps there be a time limit on maintaining former club members data.

Anyone can retrieve past member info from the international website by visiting ADMINISTRATIVE REPORTS, and selecting from the drop down menu.

Good luck!