Changing email delivery

This article covers how emails are delivered; please also read the companion article about why we're changing email addresses as well.

For over 20 years we have had a system whereby messages sent to various email addresses of the form email@quaker.org.nz gets forwarded on to a designated recipient on another service. In the last few years this system has become increasingly unreliable with problems delivering messages, and even when they're delivered, they get categorized as "spam" so that the recipient never sees them.

This is almost entirely due to changes at the receiving ISPs and email providers, becoming ever more suspicious of spam, phishing, and malware; they now look at the original sender of any incoming email, and check whether we are allowed to send email from that address, and increasingly the policy is "no". From their point of view, forwarded email is indistinguishable forged email, and so they lump our emails in with "spam", and either reject it, discard it, or relegate it to the user's spam folder.

We can tolerate some rejected emails, as we can put those in an emergency folder for WTST to check, but discarded emails are a severe reputational risk as it appears to the sender that Quakers are simply ignoring them.

To restore reliable delivery of incoming messages, we need to change how messages from the public are received and passed on to the relevant role holder(s).

Rather than forwarding into the email inboxes of one or more role holders, we now provide mailboxes from which Friends can collect and read messages.

Note that this does not apply to subscribers of mailing lists, such as ANZ Friends Newsletter, or the recipients of circulated Meeting Minutes, where the sender is a role-holder. The problem to be solved is the case where we accept email from an arbitrary (usually unknown) sender, and need to deliver it to a role-holder.

We are investigating using a commercial email service provider, but in the meantime we are continuing to migrate existing recipient role holders onto our in-house mailbox service. We are contacting role holders individually as we notice any excess of undeliverable emails.

Currently our in-house service provides email storage but not webmail access; you need to use some other program or service for that. We are investigating adding webmail.

Impact on Role Holders

There are broadly three ways of accessing email:

1. Webmail (this is the default on most computers)
2. an App tied to a particular provider (such as Gmail or Yahoo; this is the default if you're using a phone or tablet)
3. a "classic" POP or IMAP client such as Thunderbird or Eudora on your own computer (you'll already know if you're using one of these)

The last is by far the simplest: simply use the settings that we provide to configure an "additional server".

For an app or webmail, if your existing email provider supports "fetch from another mailbox", the impact is limited to a one-off set-up process. WTST will talk you through this.

Otherwise you will need a placeholder account; we suggest creating an account on the same provider you already use, so that its behaviour is familiar. WTST can talk you through this if you need assistance.