Club Email Part II

Hi again,
The VPM and I have been working all this all day. Our club email is oregoncommunicators@gmail.com. We email from our own email accounts to this but neither the VPM or I receive anything. We use it on club contacts page and it says there they can email that email directly and receive a response. What the heck are missing or doing wrong? Does it work as a direct email to us?

Mary Chisholm, DTM
VPPR
Oregon Communicators 1799014

Mary,

You have that gmail address set as your Club Archive Email Address. That just means that FreeToastHost will send a copy of all emails it processes to that email address for a permanent record of club communications. It is sort of treated as an "invisible member" of the club that is included in all email recipients.

You certainly could set that account up with forwarding rules to sent out emails to your club, but if you did that, you would be missing out on all the powerful email features that FreeToastHost already provides.

FreeToastHost provides a "list server" feature for processing email. What this means is that you send your emails to certain email addresses that the list server recognizes for your club and then the list server figures out all the people who correspond that email address and forwards the original email to them. This greatly simplifies email communications, because as long as you keep your members contact info up to date in Membership Management and use the email addresses that FTH recognizes, the system will handle getting your emails to the correct people for you.

For example, if you send an email to the members-1799014@toastmastersclubs.org email address, the list server will forward the original email to the club members that are stored in membership management. If you send an email to the officers-1799014@toastmastersclubs.org email address, the list server will forward the original email to the club members that are indicated as officers in Membership Management. The list server literally looks at who the email came from to determine if the sender is a member (non-member emails are blocked in some cases) and then it looks at the destination email address to figure out what actual people the email should be forwarded to.

Note that for this to work, your members and their contact information needs to be kept up-to-date in Membership Management. This is in addition to submitting new members to TI WHQ ... The new member submittal to WHQ does not automatically update Membership Management.

My recommendation is that you give your VPM direct access to Membership Management via the Access Settings. You should also consider which other officers may need direct access to or to update Membership Management.

Remember that FreeToastHost is primarily an email forwarder.

References:
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/email-lists-and-aliases
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/email-and-contact-forms

We use it on club contacts page and it says there they can email that email directly and receive a response

I'd suggest that you remove the reference to that address from your contact us page. When a webpage visitor presses submit, the message will go to the members on your contact list (your club settings list President, VPM & VPPR)