Rationale for changing email addresses
Rationale for changing Quaker email addresses
This article covers changing email addressing; please also read the companion article about changing email delivery to use mailboxes.
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.
Terminology
It's important to make sure that a few key points of terminology are understood.
An email address comprises two parts, separated by an @ ("at") symbol. The part to the left is the local part, and the part to the right is a domain.
A domain is a point in a hierarchy or tree, with its root on the right. This means that domain "support.quakers.nz" is a subdomain of "quakers.nz", and "quakers.nz" is a subdomain of "nz". (The dots are what separate domains from subdomains; "long-example.org.nz" is not a subdomain of "example.org.nz", but they're both subdomains of "org.nz".)
Whoever holds a domain is free to define whatever subdomains and local parts they like; there are no registration fees payable for doing so.
We use the domain to distinguish between groups, and the local part primarily to distinguish roles within a group.
One person may have several addresses corresponding to the roles they hold. We do not currently provide "personal" addresses.
And the structure and organization isn't obvious because there are so many exceptions. While most addresses are of the form group.role@quaker.org.nz, such as ym.clerk@quaker.org.nz or nt.news@quaker.org.nz, there's also a lot of "historical baggage", with addresses in odd forms such as outreach.dn@quaker.org.nz or chgroups@quaker.org.nz, and numerous addresses that are for functions of a particular group without identifying the group, such as friendscentre@quaker.org.nz. There are also limitations that make it inconvenient to create new addresses for new functions, and to get rid of obsolete addresses for discontinued functions.
We aren't planning to get rid of these old addresses, but managing them has become an increasing headache, so we need to move to something that simplifies and streamlines the process.
Improving reliability
To be blunt, our current email domain quaker.org.nz has been unloved for so long that by now its technical reputation is basically equivalent to "source of unexpurgated spam". To have any hope of immediate improvement, we need a new domain. Fortunately, we have one: quakers.nz.
Improving autonomy
In the future, we don't want the activities of separate groups (YM committees, Monthly Meetings, Recognized Meetings, etc) to negatively affect each other, so to help with this, we propose that all new email addresses be of the form role@group.quakers.nz. That is, we assign a separate subdomain to each group.
Improving access
Having a separate (sub-)domain per group also enables us to provide "domain wildcards", which might not seem particularly useful, but it means a group can create a new role and start to publicize its new email address before completing the necessary technicalities, without having to worry that messages sent to it will be lost. Instead, such messages are automatically sent to the group's default contact person -- usually their clerk -- who can forward them manually until the automatic forwarding is set up.