Emails and Calendar Invites

I recently ran into an issue with the provided club emails (members,guests,prospects,etc.) We began using them recently to have a more centralized way of communicating with all of these individuals. Part of this is to move away from utilizing my company email and using my personal email (to keep those two things separate).

When I created the Google Calendar invite and added the provided emails as "Guests" to the invite each member got an email and calendar invite for each provided email. Because of an update to the invite itself this turned into 20+ emails. I've tested this with my officers and one of the empty groups we don't use currently and it doesn't seem to be an issue with Google Calendar alone, but how the calendar and the FTH2 club emails communicate.

If someone would like to see how this operates I can add you to the invite list and update my test meeting I have setup. Since we'll be having elections soon I'd like to have things ready to go and documented before handing these emails off to the new officers.

The FTH list server converts the list addresses to individually sent emails. Additionally, you need to check your reply settings for stuff like this, since if you have the reply settings set to reply to all members... it can wreck havoc. You can also put a reply setting override in the subject line.

Where is the original email being created? Google Calendar? Membership Management? An email agent? (e.g gmail) It matters.

I would suggest that you need to be sure you clearly understand how the list server is processing the lists before you undertake something like this.

I was generating the invite from the Google Calendar web interface. There aren't many options for how to reply or what kind of header information gets sent over. For now we're going to just continue to send basic emails without the calendar invites to avoid this again.

Can you link me to any references that would help me troubleshoot this better? Also, anything on how the list server processes emails? I've gleaned a little from what I can observer how each list handles people by putting myself into each and sending emails.

I'm the web/tech/etc for the club and I'm trying to make certain things easily repeatable and transferable. Emails, invites, and communication should be simple and repeatable. That's where these list emails come in very handy, but I need more on how they work so I can warn others and set them up for success instead of spamming our members/guests/prospects like I did today. Luckily everyone had a good laugh and understood.

Some pointers...

1. Do always use the club number version of the list emails when using them in external services. Avoids problems from alias or domain changes over time.
2. Add external services domains to the club white list.
3. Set up the club archive email address... it can help w/ troubleshooting.
4. For testing, set up a custom group first and send to that.
5. When testing, always only send to members list first. If you abuse the system for sending to guests, prospects, former members, it reflects badly on the system (spam reputation) and we reserve the right to take action in that case.

For best results, split up email lists into separate emails.
Reason: Some email systems will send same email to FTH mutliple times for each address in To field. FTH does not require the multiple sends since it parses the separate addresses in one pass. FTH tries to detect multiple sends of the same email via caching of the Message-ID header in the email, but it is possible with atypical email senders (Google Calendar?) that its detection could be thwarted. If you can give me the raw source of one of the emails that Google Calendar sent out, I can take a look to see if the Message-ID header is still maintained.

Available references:

support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/email-and-contact-forms
support.toastmastersclubs.org/blog/105-t...asthost-email-system
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/email-troubleshooting
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/email-from-mailing-lists
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/custom-groups
(If you whitelist the sending domain, you can ignore the bit about publically accessible FTH addresses--only do this after lots of testing though.)

That helps a lot. I see where my errors occurred. I was trying to be concise in what I was doing, but it ended up biting me. We only send a few mailings per week (1-3) and it's all related to the next meeting. In my attempt to keep it simple I was adding everyone to the same correspondence. I'll need to just break it up into individual requests and make sure some of the other things you suggested are in place.

Thank you for everything. I think I'm on my way to working this out.