TOPIC:

One of my fellow Toastmasters heard at the international convention in DC a couple weeks ago that it is possible to send emails to all members of the district. He was told that FreeToastHost allows 500 emails/day to be sent via GMail.

Everything I have read seems to indicate that is possible but I would need to import all the members into FreeToastHost as Friends/Affiliates. Might be easier to load our 150+ club presidents but the request is out there to email all the members.

Thank you for any clarification you can offer on this.

Gil Michelini, DTM
District 11 Webmaster
d11.toastmastersdistricts.org/

Well, *some* of that is accurate. (not the 500 email limit though)

First, define what you mean by "all members" ... all members in every club in a district? We do not provide a direct way for districts to do that, but of course, if you import them into Friends/Affilliates via the Quick Add you *might* be able to do it.

The catch... Membership Management will take *forever* to load since it loads and formats the table for every person on every tab.

When I did the MM revamp, I *never* anticipated that districts and clubs would want to do as much with it and keep as many people in it as you all seem to want to now. (It has been a real eye opener for me.) So, it currently is not really built to perform well with an entire district's worth of members. I am going to need to do another revamp that loads information in a peacemeal fashion to keep the performance tolerable for large data sets.

Technically, though, MM was *never* envisioned as a full CRM type of solution for districts. (I know Brian would definitely tell you that.)

My Recommendation: Use ConstantContact (what my district uses) or MailChimp for district bulk emailing.

FTH is not a mass mail system, please use mailchimp, or constant contact for such large mailing lists.

Steve, you built a great tool and we users will help you make is amazing. Thanks for the insight and advice.

One of my early technical jobs was as 'postmaster' for a (then) major email service provider. Most honest people are unaware of how spam filtering and email in general work.

These general rules may guide you whenever sending emails:

Your single email may be blocked if:
An attached file is larger than 5 MB.
An attachment has an 'executable' extension. Indiana Univ. has a good list: kb.iu.edu/d/ajch
You have more that 10~12+ receivers

Your email address may be blacklisted (blocked forever) if:
One or more receivers report your email as UCE (i.e. spam)
You send to 20~50+ receivers.
You send many copies of the same email in rapid succession to the same email service.
An attached file contacts a know virus ( if you send from an infected PC you may not even know it!)

Rules vary greatly for depending on each receiver's mail service. As you can see sending bulk emails is fraught with issues. I highly recommend you use bulk email VERY sparingly and take SteveTheTechie's advice.