If you send a message to

    <yourclub>-members@ourcarclub.com.au    
        [or]
    <yourclub>-members@ourcarclub.info
        

it will be propagated to all your current members. It’s that simple.

It won’t relay any old thing that it’s sent though, the sender has to be authorised (see below). The sender will of course receive a copy of the email once it’s been routed through the system, and there’s also a Wall post added to your OurCarClub home page along the lines of:

    Email from Fred Nurk <elprez at someclub.org.au> entitled 'We're using OurCarClub and we love it!!!' sent
    to 82 addresses (emailer, 2011-12-30 19:16:28)

    
If a message is sent that isn’t from an authorised user, it gets relayed to the OurCarClub system users for that club (the committee), along with a notification email explaining what it is and what they should do with it. So you can vet any mails that come in from non committee members or non members. An email will be accepted and broadcast to your members if the sender’s email address meets one of the following conditions:

• it is the official club email address recorded on the Categories page
• it is an address associated with a current committee member (as recorded in OurCarClub)
• it is an address associated with someone authorised to use your OurCarClub system
• it is an address associated with an Affiliate where the “Can Email Members” checkbox is enabled
• it is an address registered in the Authorised Email Senders list

Furthermore, you can choose to personalise your emails. If you put:

    Dear {{recipient_fname}},

in the email, at the time it is sent to each member that token will be replaced by their real first name, so Bob’s email says Dear Bob, Fred’s email says Dear Fred, and so on. The tokens available for personalisation in this manner are:

    {{recipient}}              which produces Fred Nurk elprez@someclub.org.au
    {{recipient_fname}} which produces Fred
    {{recipient_lname}} which produces Nurk
    {{recipient_email}} which produces elprez@someclub.org.au

For even more email personalisation, see the advanced topic on Email Merge.

There are no limits on the number of emails you can send. The maximum size of any email (including attachments) is 15MB, but bear in mind that individual recipients’ ISPs may refuse to accept messages that are larger than what they permit, or if the recipient’s mailbox is full. Consider breaking messages that big up into several emails, or better still, upload these large documents on your website and send your members a link to download them. Your members with dial-up or slower mobile broadband will appreciate it.

Finally, the address:

    <yourclub>@ourcarclub.com.au
    

is an alias for the address above, but we recommend using the tag “members” in the address because it is more explicit, and to be consistent with the other options shown next.

Chapters are often used by large clubs that cover a significant geographical area, and have need to send messages just to members in particular “zones”. If your club uses this feature, each member will have been assigned to one of these Chapters. Each chapter record has a “code”, which forms part of the email address. It must be lower-case letters and numbers only, no other punctuation marks are permitted.

1. The code field. This forms part of the email address
2. The email address. In this case it is <yourclub>-gws@ourcarclub.com.au
3. This is an example of a link described in a few pages, under “That’s a lot of email address options! How can I know who will receive what?“

OurCarClub supports the recording of your club’s ‘affiliates’ – other car clubs you correspond with, sponsors, advertisers and so on. You can email all your affiliates or sponsors directly from the system.

To send a message to all your affiliates or sponsors with an email address recorded, just address the email to

    <yourclub>-affiliates@ourcarclub.com.au

You can address a message to both regular members and affiliates by simply including <yourclub>-members@ourcarclub.com.au and <yourclub>-affiliates@ourcarclub.com.au as recipients of the message.

Each individual Affiliate Type can also be targeted for a specific email. See the topic “Advanced Email Options” for more information. NB For this situation, you would find the email address to use on the Affiliate Type View page.

If you just want to send an email to all the committee members, you can address a message to

    
    <yourclub>-committee@ourcarclub.com.au
    

and it will go only to those members who are recorded as current committee members in your OurCarClub system. If you create additional committees, each committee will have its own email address, which can be found on the “View” page for that Committee. Note that emails sent to committee addresses do not go through the validation discussed earlier, so anyone can send a message to the committee. Although OCC will catch as much spam as possible, publishing your OCC committee email address on your public web-page is likely to see it harvested by spambots. Best practice is to use a “Contact Us” form on your website that does not expose the email address directly.

If you create additional sub-committees, each of those will have an email address shown on their View page. This is also the case for most categorisation tables that support email segmentation (e.g. Member Types, Vehicle Class and so on.) If you have multiple committees, the address

    <yourclub>-officers@ourcarclub.com.au (or) <yourclub>-officials@ourcarclub.com.au

can be used to send a message to all committee members, whilst ensuring they get only one copy each, even if they hold multiple positions on multiple committees.

There are links in the Messaging tab on your club’s OurCarClub home-page to each of these options. To recap, they are:

    <yourclub>-members@ourcarclub.com.au
    <yourclub>-affiliates@ourcarclub.com.au
    <yourclub>-committee@ourcarclub.com.au
    

Finally, there are a couple of other sub-group options; an email to:

    <yourclub>-expiring@ourcarclub.com.au

will be sent onto only those members who haven’t renewed their membership and are in ‘Expiring’ status. Handy for that final reminder that they’re about to be ‘struck off’!

Before they reach that stage, you can also address a message to members whose renewal is about to fall due by sending it to:

    <yourclub>-dueNN@ourcarclub.com.au

where NN represents the maximum number of days remaining before they will move from “Current” to “Expiring”. This is particularly useful for clubs that do not have an single anniversary model for renewals, but have members renewing throughout the year on an individual cycle, as well as those that offer multi-year membership, or don’t wish to send renewal notices to Honorary Life Members. For example, if your club’s renewals fall due on 30 June, then you might send a renewal message to all members sometime in May, addressed to <yourclub>-due60@ourcarclub.com.au

You can also contact just the members that have expired recently using a similar email address. A message sent to:

<yourclub>-lapsed180@ourcarclub.com.au

would only be received by those members whose membership lapsed in the last 6 months, and not every lapsed member since forever.

OurCarClub provides a method to see what email addresses will receive a message sent to a particular OCC email address. This is available on the Messaging tab of the home page, as a Report on the Reports menu, and as a feature wherever custom email addresses are shown in the application. For either of the first two options above, you simply enter the address you plan on sending your message to, and the output will be a report showing the recipients. Where the option appears on a specific email address link, it will obviously show recipients of that email address.

NB: The appearance of an address in this list does not guarantee successful delivery to that address. Messages that are too big or that look like spam may still get bounced by your member’s ISP.