Emailing a group

m9934

Hi,
Looking for advice. I'm the secretary of a voluntary group of less than 250 people. As the secretary I receive queries from members and send them out to the group via email. Up to now all email addresses were in the To field and visible to everyone in the group. Due to GDPR, and emails that were sent to members without going through the committee first we agreed emails would be sent out BCC. The problem is this doesn't work very well as emails are marked as spam and bounce back. We use Gmail. We don't want members to have to make any changes or have to sign up to anything. I just want to be able to send emails with attachments without members being able to view the other people's addresses. We're happy to sign up to an email client if that would work.
Any advice welcome. I'm not particularly techy. Looking for a simple solution. Thanks!

EdgeCase

Ideally you should be using a proper newsletter service that allows people to opt out.

Also, with Gmail you need to be logged in via the web interface to send e-mails to more than 100 recipients and even then, it may be spam filtered as they don't want to be a source of commercial spam and certain patterns in your mail may have triggered a filter.

A lot of e-mail accounts will just spam filter BCC: lined emails too.

If it's a discussion, perhaps use of a secure forum might be better than email?

SilverSideUp

What sort of content are you sending in your emails and attachments?

m9934

SilverSideUp wrote: »

What sort of content are you sending in your emails and attachments?

Thanks for the replies. The content could be a question I send out to the group then if I get a reply I send it around. Sometimes attaching a small size pdf or word doc, job adverts, or link to a poll.
We're using Gmail and just want to protect members privacy by not having their emails addresses available to other members. Any suggestions on how to do this in the simplest way would be appreciated. Thanks

OldMrBrennan83

m9934 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. The content could be a question I send out to the group then if I get a reply I send it around. Sometimes attaching a small size pdf or word doc, job adverts, or link to a poll.
We're using Gmail and just want to protect members privacy by not having their emails addresses available to other members. Any suggestions on how to do this in the simplest way would be appreciated. Thanks

BCC will do that won't it?

smuggler.ie

BCC is great, however, just be aware off some BCC usage niggles: Avoid the Nightmare of the Email Blind Carbon Copy (BCC).


You can create "label" with meaningful names(AllMembers, ManagersOnly, etc.), add desired members from your contact list. Just to be different, G call them "labels" and not "groups" - same d*** - different hand.

You can have as many "labels" for different purposes with different contacts in them. Each contact can be in multiple "labels".

Send message To: yourself and type "label" (you can mail multiple "labels" same time) name into BCC: field to speed up process. Don't put anyone in CC: to avoid "reply all" problem.

wally1990

MailChimp is a great website I use
I can bulk upload my email addresses, nobody sees each other and you can opt out too

Ten Pin

Mail merge is possibly what you need. It allows you to send individual mails to a list of addresses. Prepare one message and the program sends a separate email to every address in the list.

Probably the best way to achieve it is via ms office program on a PC with your gmail account added.

RobertFoster

Another option for a mailing list is Google Groups. You can create a private email-based group. Members don't have to sign up (you add them), but they can unsubscribe themselves from it if they wish.

smuggler.ie

RobertFoster wrote: »

Another option for a mailing list is Google Groups. You can create a private email-based group. Members don't have to sign up (you add them), but they can unsubscribe themselves from it if they wish.

Option, however, permissions on group need to be wisely modified to eliminate membership exposure (View Members, Post, potentially many other)


To my opinion, this G "feature" is more designed to "socialize" rather than keep "anonymity", but with severe restrictions might serve for that purpose too.