Running small-ish societies and companies remotely

[Dave2002]

The lockdown business has caused disruption to many of us, and it has also disrupted small societies, which may send out newsletters or other relevent documents to their membership. Some small businesses will also have been affected.

Small might mean anything between 5 and 200 people.

I have been trying to find out how to send out a newsletter for a society on behalf of a volunteer. Apart from other technical difficulties, with really rather poor email software, it does seem that there are constraints. Sending an email with approaching 100 recipients may not work, though this depends on how the attempt is made. Some email services will allow up to 100 recipients in emalls in a day (e.g. Outlook) while one - Gmail - will allow up to 500 recipients in a day.

In order to effect this, it may be necessary to use webmail, rather than a specific email client program running on an end user's machine. The user interfaces for the different systems may be similar, but they are not identical. What works on one machine with one ISP may not work on another, with a different ISP, and there are differences between (say) using IMAP in one client system, and using webmail on the same computer.

I would expect large companies to have a dedicated IT team to sort out this kind of issue, and they probably use their own mail servers as well as other special software. Few of us who are now effectively in the role of IT specialist/system manager have enough expertise in these areas, even if we are capable of running our own software effectively.

If this kind of home working is to continue, which I rather hope it will, as a lot of work in offices, with the travel associated, is completely unnecessary (IMO) - then consideration needs to be given as to how to upskill people for whom any IT work is a complete mystery.

[hmvman]

Mailchimp might be an option for you. You can send to up to 2,000 email addresses with the free version. I've not used it myself but I know several people who do for societies and small business mailings and have found it ok.

https://mailchimp.com

[Frances_iom]

I've looked at two societies I'm in that send out mags etc by email, one with less than 50 members uses webmail using a club subscription to a local manx ISP - the other a larger engineering soc with abt 500 members uses membermojo.co.uk which provides a mailing, annual subs collection (via paypal if wanted) + quarterly mag mails + also the specials for various sub groups within the society. Both seem to work well.

I suggest you ask some local societies how they cope as both these are engineering socs and thus will have committee members more au fait with computers.

[Dave2002]

It turns out to be a case of (Fail)+ Success. Many false starts.

What finally seems to have worked was very unexpected - use Notes in iOS, which was able to send the desired text to almost all the list of email recipients, seemingly without complaint. Other methods such as using Gmail or Outlook mailboxes, and using mail clients, even including Thunderbird, mostly failed. Either they didn't pick up a correct address list, or if they did actually attempt to send the mail, that failed, presumably due to the anti-spam blocking. So for the moment we seem to have a solution - though I can't guarantee it'll still work in a few months time.

Nevertheless thanks to everyone who read this thread and contributed, and maybe our solution will help some of you in due course.

[Dave2002]

Actually I'm still not sure if it was Notes which "solved" the issue last month. It might have been a combination of Notes and email.

The problem came back to bite again this month, but was eventually solved this time by using Gmail via a web browser. Getting the text and the mail list in to the web based message input space was tricky, but doable.

I'm not a great fan of Gmail and Google, but those seem to be the only providers which will allow mailing out around 150 mails to society members.
Of course Gmail/Google are harvesting the emails, and at the same time promising to keep them safe. What realistic alternative there is for this kind of action I really do not know.