Our local billiards club contemplating using a "free" group-emails-facilitator for all communications to our 76 pool players

[arnaldo]

They're considering a service called GroupWorks.

I'm personally a bit uneasy with supplying any outside entity with a list of 70 club members' email addresses.

Sometimes (just my opinion) the services of "free" group-email facilitators may not be free if unwanted problems or intrusions accrue via third parties ads (or worse).

My thought is that in-house BCC-ed group emails seems a safer way to go. Any experience-based or business-savvy opinions on this?

Arnaldo ~ Many thanks in advance for all of your very welcome thoughts or guidance here.
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[sixpack]

They're considering a service called GroupWorks.

I'm personally a bit uneasy with supplying any outside entity with a list of 70 club members' email addresses.

Sometimes (just my opinion) the services of "free" group-email facilitators may not be free if unwanted problems or intrusions accrue via third parties ads (or worse).

My thought is that in-house BCC-ed group emails seems a safer way to go. Any experience-based or business-savvy opinions on this?

Arnaldo ~ Many thanks in advance for all of your very welcome thoughts or guidance here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I'm not familiar with that service. But you can just set up a throw away gmail account and then set it to forward all incoming messages to your regular email. If you start getting spam on that account you'll know they sold it or shared it.

Then when the league is over and/or you don't want to recieve messages anymore just abandon the gmail address and stop the automatic forwarding.

 

[ctyhntr]

Why not Constant Contact, MailChimp or other well known e-mail distribution service?

 

[Bob Jewett]

Why not Constant Contact, MailChimp or other well known e-mail distribution service?

My ISP provides a mailing list service (or maybe two) that is free. The group admin (club manager?) puts in the addresses and then email sent to the group is broadcast to all the members. The members do not see each others email addresses; they see only the email address of the group on the server site, like billrds924@gmail.net.

The particular software that my ISP offers is called "mailman" but there are others available.

I think you need an automated system that does not depend on a person to handle each message and there needs to be a single list of emails. I know one group that requires every member to keep their own complete list of emails or send any message through the "list person", an approach I think is broken.

There are also Facebook groups, but friends don't make friends use Facebook.

 

[hurricane145]

I have been subscribed to many groups.io for a variety of different electronics related stuff. Basically it is an email reflector. One ham radio related local club uses it as well that I subscribe to. It has never been any kind of a problem and has been in use for forwarding emails to and from the subscribers for several years.
There may be other services that work in a similar fashion.

 

[Bob Jewett]

... There may be other services that work in a similar fashion.

Some of the services keep archives of all the messages which allows new members to catch up.

One problem that seems to be starting is that people use email only when forced to.

 

[Fatboy]

Just assemble an opt-in email list. And attach a clear and conspicuous opt-out button on all emails/

Nobody will get too pissed off and it’s clean data.


Fatboy<——-was in the list management biz from 96-08. It was a side gig as it related to the credit biz I was in.

 

[hang-the-9]

They're considering a service called GroupWorks.

I'm personally a bit uneasy with supplying any outside entity with a list of 70 club members' email addresses.

Sometimes (just my opinion) the services of "free" group-email facilitators may not be free if unwanted problems or intrusions accrue via third parties ads (or worse).

My thought is that in-house BCC-ed group emails seems a safer way to go. Any experience-based or business-savvy opinions on this?

Arnaldo ~ Many thanks in advance for all of your very welcome thoughts or guidance here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are a ton of marketing and other companies that deal with emails, but for just normal communications, make a simple email group and send the stuff yourself. No need to get any other place involved. It's not even a safety issue, since I would bet that 95% of those emails are already shared with 50 companies, but it's just easier and cheaper to simply use a Gmail or whatever email service you use now.

 

[phreaticus]

They're considering a service called GroupWorks.

I'm personally a bit uneasy with supplying any outside entity with a list of 70 club members' email addresses.

Sometimes (just my opinion) the services of "free" group-email facilitators may not be free if unwanted problems or intrusions accrue via third parties ads (or worse).

My thought is that in-house BCC-ed group emails seems a safer way to go. Any experience-based or business-savvy opinions on this?

Arnaldo ~ Many thanks in advance for all of your very welcome thoughts or guidance here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Arnaldo,

When Yahoo Groups finally fully melted down, the vast majority of folks migrated to groups.io - for good reason. For basic email group mgt its free, has all the features anyone needs, and is super easy to setup & use. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find a better solution.

Cheers

 

[goin2bepro]

You can also look at options within the Microsoft Office suite called Mail Merger. You can use it to link Excel lists of members to Outlook email for distro purposes.

 

[hurricane145]

Some of the services keep archives of all the messages which allows new members to catch up.

One problem that seems to be starting is that people use email only when forced to.

The nice thing about an email reflector is that I get a notification on my phone whenever something is posted so I know right away whats going on.
With Facebook and other social media I wouldn't know until I open the app and more intentionally look to see whats going on. If it is something that is time sensitive, email or a text works much better.
Groups.io has archived messages that you can search through or just review to get caught up, maybe look up answers to questions. You have to go to that particular groups home page to do it. There are a couple links in each email that may be handy for doing that stuff.
They list the amount of messages by year and month and you can click on the number to see all the messages for that month and you can search in different ways.

If people don't want to use email or cannot figure out how to get their primary email on their phone or set up a new additional account for a specific purpose then they will just have to suffer and accept it.