Best practices for email setup when using domain name

Club number: 6924422, San Marino Toastmasters ( sanmarinotoastmasters.org )

Hi - apologies if this has been answered already - I did try searching through the documentation & forum posts first!

We obtained our domain name and stared using it with Google G-Suite, particularly email, prior to activating our club's FTH account. I pointed our web DNS A records to FTH, but haven't done so with our MX - as I'm a bit reluctant to let go of using Gmail. However I do like FTH's built in email lists and aliases, and would love to take advantage of them, especially the 'members' and 'officers' lists.

Obviously since MX is still pointing to Gmail, if someone in the public emailed into 'members@sanmarinotoastmasters.org' it would go to Gmail and not hit FTH's mail facility and forward out to all our club's members. I tried to create a the email address on the Google side and forward to the club number alias of the members distribution list (eg. members-6924422@toastmastersclubs.org), but the forward was rejected by the FTH server because the email alias address (members-6924422@toastmastersclubs.org) was not in the 'To' or 'CC' fields.

Has anyone else come up with a solution or workaround for this particular situation. Sorry for making this setup so complicated, just looking for a best practice here. Thanks in advance!

- Chris Lee

FreeToastHost does not provide email accounts... the FTH provided email addresses are strictly forwarding email addresses and/or distribution lists. The expectation is that your members would have their own email accounts and those email addresses would be entered into Membership Management. The various list addresses just forward emails to those email addresses that are entered.

So while you could keep your gmail account, you would need to decide what to do with it. Also, you can use FTH email *now* if you use the club number form of the email addresses instead of your custom domain.

What you will find with FTH is that there are frequently more than one way to accomplish what you want. For example, you can reach your website via 6924422.toastmastersclubs.org or sanmarinotoastmasters.org ... either will work.

Thanks for the quick reply! The built in forwarding from the distribution lists to the members' email addresses in Membership Management is a great feature and saves a ton of time over managing distribution lists manually. I wouldn't make sense to try to recreate those distribution lists on the Gmail side. Looks like my best option is to point MX over to FTH and have all email flow through there. Thanks again.

I do recommend that you read our online docs about our email handling.

While our list server is basically forwarding emails to distribution lists, there are quite a bit of enhanced email features, also. (tooting my own horn a bit since I created most of those, lol) Because the list server "sees" every email before forwarding, there is a good bit of built in spam protection, as a specific example. Also, if you wanted to keep your gmail account, you could set it up as an archival account... then, copies of all your emails would go to that account for your review and future reference.

I just thought I would mention this as a way to encourage you further. I am going to lock this thread since it seems you have made your choice.