How Mailing Lists Work

How Mailing Lists Work

About Email Distribution Lists

An email distribution list lets you send emails to a group of people in your scouting unit with a single email address. TroopTrack distribution lists protect you from spam and other unauthorized uses of the list by checking who is sending the email and making sure they have permission to use the list the email is sent to. Emails from people who are not on the list of "authorized senders" are simply ignored.

You can use the email distribution lists in TroopTrack, sending quick messages, and you can also use them in your personal email client, such as Gmail or Outlook. When sending from your personal email client, make sure your email address with that client is the same as your primary email address on TroopTrack.

How to Get There

Click on the Communicate badge to see all your email distribution lists. 

Magic Mailing Lists

Magic mailing lists are mailing lists that are automatically created for you by TroopTrack. The recipients of each list are based on the person's role in your scouting organization. The standard magic mailing lists are:

  • All members
  • Scouts
  • Adults
  • Leaders
  • Parents
  • Plus one for every Patrol/Den/Unit that you have

When you edit a magic mailing, you can edit the authorized senders but not the recipients. 

Custom Mailing Lists

Magic mailing lists not doing what you need them to? You can create your own by navigating to the Communicate menu and selecting the Custom Mailing Lists option, which will take you to the page shown below:



Fill out the form, making sure you give the list a name that will result in a legitimate email address, with no spaces or characters that aren't allowed. Select who will receive the emails from the list on the left and who will be allowed to send the emails from the list on the left (highlighted by a blue box), then hit the blue save button. Save the email list and you can start using it immediately.

Attachments

TroopTrack mailing lists can handle attachments when you send emails from your email client, however certain limitations apply. Please don't send more than one attachment per email and keep the size under 1MB. Also, make sure the email address you use with your client is your primary email address in TroopTrack.

What about Duplicates?

If you were paying attention to the example I used earlier you might have had a moment where you thought something like this:

Wait a second! I created the exact same email address! Won't that confuse things?

The short answer is no, it's okay.

The long answer is two troops can use the same email addresses without getting the wires crossed because TroopTrack looks up the email lists based on the email address of the sender. So, even if two troops (or two hundred troops) all create custom mailing lists named 'committee@trooptrack.com' it will still work because the first thing TroopTrack does when it gets an email is look for a list that the sender has access to and that matches the name.


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